"Keeping 'Mickey Mouse' Off the Voting Rolls"

Michael Waldman has written this opinion piece for Bloomberg.

"City Board Grapples With a New Law on Campaign Finance Rules"

NYT reports.

Politico Looks at the Limits of Presidential "Testing the Waters"

See here.

"Redistricting targets could seek other opportunities"

The Fix reports.

News from Amarillo, TX

The Amarillo Globe News: "A transgender woman vying for mayor of Amarillo is barred under state law from running under her chosen rather than legal name, officials said Wednesday."

"The Unspoken Institutional Battle over Anti-Corruption: Citizens United, Honest Services, and the Legislative-Judicial Divide"

Jacob Eisler has posted this draft on SSRN (forthcoming First Amendment Law Review). Here is the abstract:

Guided by two cases decided in 2010 (Citizens United and Skilling), this article investigates a pivotal but overlooked dispute between the Supreme Court and Congress over the acceptable contours of public corruption law. Each case narrowly relies on principles and precedents that appear only tangentially related to corruption. Yet in historical context, these cases emerge as only the latest judicial nullification of broad and flexible congressional anti-corruption legislation. Through parallel examination of campaign finance regulation and honest services law, this article suggests a subtle but striking pattern: when Congress has advanced expansive, flexible anti-corruption measures, the Supreme Court has tenaciously constrained such measures in favor of narrowly drawn bright-line rules.

This article argues that the disagreement originates in the institutions' differing postures towards anti-corruption. Certain congressional action has promoted civic-minded public conduct, and thus facilitated 'deliberative' examination of political motives. However, the Supreme Court has generally blocked broadly constructed anti-corruption measures because their enforcement threatens constitutionally protected individual rights. Thus the Court has left standing a 'competitive' anti-corruption regime which presumes a market-like political setting populated by self-interested actors.

This unspoken divergence has shaped corruption law, and with it the nature of American politics. The Court's intractability poses a dilemma for future anti-corruption reform. Policy-makers must either defer to the Court but relinquish the possibility of deliberative anti-corruption achieved through traditional regulatory and prosecutorial means, or force a reconsideration of individual rights in the context of anti-corruption enforcement.

"Here's What Happens When Your Shareholders Catch You Spending Money On Politics"

Interesting.

"Lobbyists Aggressively Targeted Democrats' Top Priorities During Barack Obama's First Two Years"

The Center for Responsive Politics offers these interesting data.

"Ex-Ky Judge Gets 25-plus Years for Vote Fraud"

AP offers this report. See also this more detailed report. I imagine this was all done with absentee ballots, which is my experience in examining these cases (especially ones out of Kentucky), but that is not mentioned anywhere in the story. Can someone please let me know?

UPDATE: Thanks to an ELB reader for passing on a link to the indictment. Wow. Depressing to think that this kind of stuff could still happen anywhere in the U.S. in 2011.

"Critics challenging Lugar's state residency"

The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette offers this report.