Fierce Government reports. … Continue reading
Category Archives: political parties
Bloomberg reports. … Continue reading
Heavy Crossroads involvement promised for GOP primaries. … Continue reading
Sandy Levinson put together a dynamite conference last week. You can now watch video of the panels. Jack Balkin also posted important and provocative comments, “Dysfunctional Constitution or Regime Change?,” based on his conference remarks. … Continue reading
Could be. … Continue reading
Weigel explores. … Continue reading
WaPo reports. The Fix: Why Filibuster Reform Didn’t Happen Senator Reid tells Ezra Klein: “I’m not personally, at this stage, ready to get rid of the 60-vote threshold,” Reid (D-Nev.) told me this morning, referring to the number of votes needed … Continue reading
Roll Call: “Democratic senators favoring the most robust overhaul of the chamber’s filibuster rules do not have the votes to enact a ‘talking filibuster,’ even with a simple majority, according to the top Democratic vote-counter.’ … Continue reading
Politico: “K Street is living through lean times. The majority of big D.C. lobby shops have seen their revenues flat-line or decline during the last year of President Barack Obama’s first term — buffeted by a lingering global financial crisis, … Continue reading
Smart Jonathan Bernstein Post-Partisan blog post: “But overall, it’s really easy for me to imagine a large group of Republican senators loudly opposing Senate reform while privately wishing that Democrats will go nuclear. Which means that Democrats who really want … Continue reading
The Hill: “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will present colleagues with options for reforming the Senate’s filibuster rules in a Democratic caucus meeting Tuesday. Reid and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) are close to reaching a deal to … Continue reading
Important piece in The New Yorker. Klein quotes Tom Mann on why a half-measured reform would be worse than no reform: “You won’t have fixed the Senate. But you will have further poisoned the environment.” A timely article, as filibuster … Continue reading
FairVote: “A memo from the National Republican Congressional Committee obtained by the National Journal Wednesday identifies seven Democratic Members of Congress as the primary targets for an expanded Republican majority in 2014: Mike McIntyre, Jim Matheson, Nick Rahall, John Barrow, Collin Peterson, … Continue reading
Zocalo asks. Here are the answers from a number of experts: Tom S. Clark It depends on how you define partisan Mickey Edwards It’s the partisanship of the U.S. Senate, not the judges it confirms, that we should … Continue reading
Josh Chafetz has posted this draft on SSRN (Notre Dame Law Review). Here is the abstract: Assertions that our legislative process is gridlocked — perhaps even “hopelessly” so — are endemic. So many more of our problems would be fixed, … Continue reading
HuffPo reports. … Continue reading
Lyle links to the order. I had thought this case had a pretty good chance of being granted, as it raised some very interesting issues about modification of long standing consent decrees in the context of a meaty political dispute. … Continue reading
See here. … Continue reading
RNC v. DNC is on the SCOTUSBlog “Petitions to Watch” list for tomorrow. I’ve said this has a pretty good chance of being granted, and it would make for a very interesting Remedies/Election law case. … Continue reading
I’m really looking forward to participating in this symposium organized by Sandy Levinson (see the schedule and list of participants). Here’s the general description: Pundits and political figures across the political spectrum now regularly refer to the United States government–and … Continue reading
Harry Enten writes for The Guardian. … Continue reading
Ballot Access News reports. Mark Paul: “That doesn’t count as definitive evidence, but it’s a reminder that we are still waiting for the [top two primary] reformers to show us any evidence that the changes they pimped have had any … Continue reading
The Fix reports. … Continue reading
Politico: “The disastrous 2012 election and embarrassing fiscal cliff standoff has brought forth one principal conclusion from establishment Republicans: They have a primary problem. The intra-party contests, or threat thereof, have become the original sin that explains many of the … Continue reading
Steven Duffield: The most dramatic impact of the Reid Plan will be with regard to the Supreme Court, where the House of Representatives plays no constitutional role. President Obama will likely fill between one and three Supreme Court vacancies … Continue reading
NBC News First Read: In addition, just 219 bills have been passed into law — the lowest number since Congress began tracking this number in the 1940s. (And many of these bills were naming courthouses or post offices.) The previous … Continue reading
Political Wire: Harry Enten looks at statistics that rank members of Congress on a scale from -1 for most liberal to 1 for most conservative and finds Senate and House Democrats have been fairly stable at -0.4 since 1992. “There … Continue reading
Important NPR report on polarization. … Continue reading
Interesting NYT report. … Continue reading
Nate Silver: “In 1992, there were 103 members of the House of Representatives elected from what might be called swing districts: those in which the margin in the presidential race was within five percentage points of the national result. But … Continue reading
Jim Gardner has posted this draft on SSRN. Here is the abstract: American federalism contemplates that states will retain a significant degree of autonomy so that state power can serve as a meaningful counterweight to national power. It is often … Continue reading
FiveThirtyEight: “An American child grows up in a married household in the suburbs. What are the chances that his family keeps a gun in their home? The probability is considerably higher than residents of New York and other big cities … Continue reading
WaPo reports. … Continue reading
Nathan Yu has this blog post at State of Elections. … Continue reading
Bloomberg reports. … Continue reading
Iowa governor wants to kill the Ames straw poll. … Continue reading
Bloomberg View: “Uprooting intense partisanship in Washington would be easier if fewer legislators represented safe, ideologically homogenous districts. Or so reformers have long maintained. Now, with the final results in from legislative races in California, that thesis will get a … Continue reading
AP: There’s a new superpower growing in the Great Plains and the South, where bulging Republican majorities in state capitols could dramatically cut taxes and change public education with barely a whimper of resistance from Democrats. Contrast that with California, … Continue reading
John Myers’ video report. … Continue reading
Here. … Continue reading
The Fix: “Richard L. Hasen over at the Election Law Blog offers a worthwhile counterpoint to our argument in Morning Fix that the government may stay largely as-is after the 2012 election….We generally agree with Hasen’s point that moderates are … Continue reading
FairVote analysis. … Continue reading
CBS News reports. … Continue reading
Yesterday at the excellent Politics in the Extreme conference at Cal State Channel Islands, there was a great panel on the top two primary featuring a paper by Seth Masket (draft here) and comments by Timm Herdt and Joe Mathews. … Continue reading
The Fix — with pics! … Continue reading
Politico: “Mitt Romney’s most potent fundraising committee is paying to outsource a big part of its final campaign push to an unusual coalition of party committees. Romney Victory, the joint fundraising committee that has raised the lion’s share of the … Continue reading
Boston Globe: “Senator Scott Brown has a new piece of evidence to bolster his argument that he is more than willing to cross party lines in the Senate. Brown, a Republican who is locked in a tough reelection battle with … Continue reading
See this oped from some LWV folks. … Continue reading
NYT: “A potent combination of Congressional redistricting, retirements of fed-up lawmakers and campaign spending by special interests is pushing out moderate members of both parties, leaving a shrinking corps of consensus builders.” I discussed how political polarization in Congress is … Continue reading
Important SacBee report. … Continue reading