"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.)

Posted by Rick Hasen at February 15, 2006 07:23 AM