"Record Independent Campaign Spending Sparks Concern"

The Los Angeles Times offers this report, which begins: "Last year's Los Angeles city election set a record for independent expenditures by unions, corporations and individuals, for a total of $4.9 million spent outside the city's system of campaign finance limits, according to a study released Tuesday. Organized labor accounted for 86% of the independent spending, including nearly $640,000 by the California Teacher's Assn. to support then-City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa for mayor, the city Ethics Commission review found. And 96% of the independent expenditures occurred 30 days or less before the election." You can also read the commission's report and press release.

"Birth of a Gerrymander; The Supreme Court Can Finally Bring Sanity to Voting Rights Law"

Abigail Thernstrom has written this commentary (originally for the Weekly Standard but available at AEI without a subscription). It begins:

On March 1, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case involving the Texas congressional redistricting plan engineered in 2003 by former House majority leader Tom DeLay. Appellants charge both that the Texas map was partisan districting run amok and that it violated the right of minority voters, under the Voting Rights Act, to elect the candidates of their choice.

On the first matter, court precedents are sparse; the High Court has been understandably reluctant to tackle partisan gerrymandering, with the result that no constitutional standards (beyond one person, one vote) govern the process. But on the second matter, where precedents are numerous and murky, the Court should seize the opportunity to begin restoring intelligibility and common sense to an area of law that seems to have come unmoored from American principle.

"Doubleheader Tests the Court's Impartiality: EL@M to host Electronic Roundtable on Pending Pair"

Ned Foley has posted this comment on Ohio State's election law site. It begins:

It may be a coincidence, but it causes the Supreme Court to confront in an unusually systematic way its role as the umpire of American democracy. In two weeks, on back-to-back days, the Court will hear arguments in two potentially monumental cases, one concerning campaign finance and the other redistricting. Because of the unprecedented significance of these essentially simultaneous deliberations, Election Law @ Moritz will host an electronic roundtable discussion of the two cases and their potential implications, including those that might result from their fortuitous conjunction on the Court's docket. In this space, beginning a week from today and continuing through the arguments on February 28 and March 1 to the end of that week (March 3), this Electronic Roundtable will include recognized election law experts Rick Hasen, Rick Pildes, and Brad Smith, as well as members of our own Moritz team.

As fodder for this conversation, I offer the following preliminary observation. In the campaign finance case, it is the Republican Party that asks the Court to intervene to protect what conservatives (or at least those of a libertarian stripe) see as essential prerequisites to a fair democratic process: the opportunity of candidates to spend however much of their own personal wealth as they wish, as well as however much they are able to raise from likeminded supporters, to advance their candidacies. In the redistricting case, by contrast, it is Democrats who seek the Court's intervention for what they believe is crucial to a fair democracy: the invalidation of mid-decade “re-redistricting” undertaken solely to advantage one political party over another. (Further analysis of the campaign finance case is here; a useful overview of the redistricting case is here, although requiring subscription.)

-- 
Rick Hasen
William H. Hannon Distinguished Professor of Law
Loyola Law School
919 Albany Street
Los Angeles, CA  90015-1211
(213)736-1466
(213)380-3769 - fax
rick.hasen@lls.edu
http://www.lls.edu/academics/faculty/hasen.html
http://electionlawblog.org