Before the Supreme Court decided McConnell, the Fourth Circuit decided North Carolina Right to Life v. Leake. Among other things, the Court struck down North Carolina’s law limiting individual contributions to indepdendent expenditure commitees—the parallel constitutional issue to the 527… Continue reading

Joshua Spivak has written California’s Recall: The State’s Adoption and Use of “the Grand Bounce.” The paper traces the recall’s early history in America, and provides a detailed discussion of California’s adoption of the recall in 1911. It also studies… Continue reading

A.P. offers this report.

Jim Bopp has published the following letter in Roll Call. It does not appear on the newspaper’s website, but here it is (with permission of Roll Call): 527 Rules: Tempting But Not Needed Emboldened by a Supreme Court victory in… Continue reading

Rosanna Taormina, who has been coordinating the Penn law review symposium that I will be attending at the end of the week (some draft symposium papers available here), has published a student note, Defying One-Person, One Vote: Prisoners and … Continue reading

From Howard Bashman‘s very informative 20 Questions for the Appellate Judge interview with Ninth Circuit judge Stephen Reinhardt: “If the Constitution does not tolerate inequalities in the standards used to recount ballots in a presidential election, it certainly should… Continue reading

Over on the election law listserv, Ned Foley responded to my Slate article by arguing for the constitutionality of limiting individual contributions to 527s. See here. Further posts in the debate, including one by Marty Lederman, are here,… Continue reading

The Christian Science Monitor offers this report. Thanks to David Ettinger for the pointer.

The San Jose Mercury News had extensive coverage of the issue yesterday here, here, and an editorial here. Thanks to Dennis Paul for the pointers.

I have posted here a copy of a new complaint that has been filed challenging the Arizona public financing system. Prior attempts to challenge the system have failed, as detailed here at page 129.

This Roll Call article (paid subscription required) talks about the upcoming controversies over 527s at the FEC (see my many blog posts in the past week on this subject below), with a focus on Democratic FEC commissioner Scott Thomas, who… Continue reading

The San Diego Union-Tribune offers this report.