From this NYT story, which was also linked to below: The jockeying comes as the party struggles to chart its path forward after losing the House, the Senate and the White House during Mr. Trump’s tenure, with moderate… Continue reading

That’s a line from this Reuters story, which shows that the cut-off in corporate contributions to candidates who objected to the electoral vote count has been more than offset by the increase in small donations. From 2008-2018, the Democrats… Continue reading

That’s the title the NYT gave my latest piece. I’ll include an excerpt here, though it’s a bit hard to excerpt this one because I raise reform proposals in four different areas: American democracy faces alarming risks from extremist… Continue reading

The Atlantic published this essay of mine on the impeachment trial. Here are some excerpts: A risk exists that the Senate impeachment trial will focus too narrowly on the events of January 6, which culminated in the attack on the… Continue reading

Open Secrets reports a completely unsurprising piece of news: The House took steps to strip Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) of her committee assignments Thursday, punishing the freshman member for trafficking baseless conspiracy theories and promoting violence against Democrats before… Continue reading

From Axios: January was Sen. Josh Hawley’s best fundraising month—by far—since his 2018 election, with a flood of small-dollar donations more than eclipsing the corporate cash he lost after leading an effort to block certification of President Biden’s Electoral… Continue reading

With the Democrats starting to push onto the agenda the package of political reforms titled the “For the People Act,” more attention is going to start getting focused on the provisions for campaign-finance reform. Those provisions involve a 6:1 small-donor… Continue reading

The International Journal of Constitutional Law (ICON), perhaps the top peer-reviewed journal on comparative constitutional law, has a lead article in its forthcoming issue by Stephen Gardbaum, entitled Comparative Political Process Theory. Drawing on challenges to democracy in a number… Continue reading

Back in 2009, when the issue of abolishing the Senate filibuster was also being discussed, I wrote this piece for the Balkinization blog on the history of the filibuster. Now that this issue is being intensely discussed again, I’m re-posting… Continue reading

The NYT has broken a story that includes coverage of confidential meetings I’ve been involved in with the country’s business leaders since the election about what role they can play in supporting the stability of American democracy. I think the… Continue reading

This is an illuminating story from the Austin American-Statesman about the spread of misinformation. The context is whether President Trump would lose his pension, travel stipend, and other benefits if convicted in the Senate trial. The false information here is… Continue reading

While we are on the subject of how the structure of campaign finance laws and practices can affect democratic governance, I want to remind readers of the recent empirical paper Michael Norton and I published, which shows that the more… Continue reading

This is a new article by Michael Barber, which further confirms what we’ve known about which donors support the ideological more extreme candidates and which support more moderates. I’ve written about these issues and what we know empirically about them… Continue reading

One important direction for improving our election system is taking election administration out of the hands of partisan actors and moving toward more professional election administration, as in many other democracies. I wanted to flag this event I’ll be participating… Continue reading