"Florida Senate to vote on elections law
Thursday"
The Orlando Sentinel offers this
report.
Posted by Rick Hasen at
10:30
PM
"Nuns' Votes Tossed in Recount"
The
latest [bizarre twist] from Wisconsin.
Posted by Rick Hasen at
10:26
PM
"The End of Campaign Finance Law"
Michael Kang has posted this
draft on SSRN (forthcoming, Virginia Law Review).
Here is the abstract:
The Article argues that Citizens United v. FEC ended campaign
finance law as we long knew it, but along lines that have little
to do with corporate electioneering. Although the public outcry
focused on the decision's narrow effect on corporations, the
Article demonstrates how the decision's broader logic
transformed campaign finance law beyond corporate electioneering
and led within months to the nearly complete de-regulation of
independent expenditures in time for the 2010 elections. Those
elections provided only a glimpse of what the Article calls the
reverse hydraulics of de-regulation, and as the Article argues,
this new de-regulated world of campaign finance is not a better
one. Citizens United therefore is a turning point not just for
campaign finance law, but all regulation of the relationship
between campaign money and the political process. However, the
Article surprisingly concludes in the end that the Supreme Court
may still be somewhat sympathetic to alternate forms of
regulation of political corruption, notwithstanding Citizens
United's broad skepticism about corruption. Namely, the Court
may be more sanguine toward government regulation of campaign
money's influence when it is structured as ex post regulation of
the legislative process on the back end, as opposed to the ex
ante structure of campaign finance regulation. Citizens United,
when considered in light of other recent Court decisions, points
this way forward for campaign finance reform without campaign
finance regulation.
Posted by Rick Hasen at
09:57
PM