AP offers this report.

AP offers this report.

See this news from Mississippi.

See this press release.

You can find it here.

NPR has posted this must-listen audio report on the Tova Wang/voter fraud controversy.

I have posted this new draft on SSRN, and I’ll be presenting this paper at APSA at the end of August. This is still a work in progress; comments welcome! Here is the abstract:

With the replacement of Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice O’Connor with Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, the pendulum has swung sharply away from Supreme Court deference to campaign finance regulation toward perhaps the greatest period of deregulation we will have witnessed since before Congress passed the important 1974 amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act. In 2006, in Randall v. Sorrell, the Court for the first time struck down individual contribution limits in candidate elections as too low. In 2007’s Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life (“WRTL”), the Court mostly eviscerated a key aspect of the McCain-Feingold law limiting corporate and union spending in federal elections. More importantly, a new Court majority has signaled its receptivity to many more challenges to campaign finance laws.
As Part I of this Article explains, as a matter of jurisprudence the Roberts Court’s new approach to campaign finance regulation is just as incoherent as the prior New Deference approach, though moving in a decidedly different ideological direction. Likely in an effort to appear “moderate” or “minimalist,” Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito have made their deregulatory moves without expressly overturning existing precedent, leading Justice Scalia in WRTL to descry Chief Justice Roberts’ and Justice Alito’s “faux judicial restraint,” which Justice Scalia says “obfuscat[es]” the Court’s sub silentio overruling of precedent. Justice Scalia is right (if impolitely blunt): given Chief Justice Roberts’ and Justice Alito’s views of the First Amendment and campaign finance regulation, there is no jurisprudential reason (though there were political reasons) for the two newest Justices not to join Justice Scalia’s concurring opinion expressly calling for overruling of the precedent of deference.
As Part II details, however, the lack of jurisprudential consistency described in Part I will be inconsequential for the politics on the ground. Beyond incoherence, the WRTL principal opinion removes effective limits on corporate and union spending from their general treasury funds in elections. The only ads that may not be paid for with such funds are those that expressly advocate the election or defeat of candidates for office and those that are “susceptible of no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate.” There are debatable issues around the edges of interpreting this new test, but those disagreements are likely to be mostly of interest to academics and to those who will deliberately craft advertisements to further push the development of deregulatory jurisprudence. The new test will not pose a formidable obstacle for those corporations and unions that wish to run ads to influence elections. As a result, we could well see a significant rise in corporate election-related spending.
Finally, Part III looks at the next likely challenges to campaign finance regulation, and how the Roberts Court is likely to address them. Though the Roberts Court’s faux “minimalist” approach allows for some variation in how lower courts will address campaign finance challenges in the near term, the lower courts’ pre-McConnell experience demonstrates that many courts are likely to strike down ever more campaign finance regulations on First Amendment grounds. Those few appellate courts that uphold such laws likely will face Supreme Court reversal. I expect to see challenges to laws that have been upheld by the Supreme Court in the past, such as the ban on corporate and union spending from treasury on “express advocacy,” the McCain-Feingold ban on contributing “soft money” to political parties, federal individual campaign contribution limit, and laws requiring disclosure of electioneering communications. I also expect to see challenges to laws that the Supreme Court has not directly addressed, such as a challenge to the constitutionality of contribution limits to independent expenditure committees and “527” organizations. I believe many of these challenges will succeed.

Via email comes this announcement (I have no more details, and nothing yet appears on the committee’s webpage):

COMMITTEE ON HOUSE ADMINISTRATION
SUBCOMMITTEE ON ELECTIONS HEARING
Thursday, August 2, 2007
2:00 pm
1310 Longworth House Office Building
Oversight Hearing on the Election Assistance Commission
If you have any questions, please contact the Committee at (202) 225-2061.

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The SF Chronicle offers this report.

This report begins: “BILLINGS, Mont. – The American Civil Liberties Union wants to intervene on behalf of Crow tribal members in a federal voting rights lawsuit that alleges fraud and discrimination during last November’s election on the Crow Indian Reservation.”

Robert Weiner and John Larmett have written this Roll Call commentary ($), which begins: “The Senate’s cloture rule defeats democracy. It lets public servants hide and obfuscate behind a parliamentary quirk never intended by the framers of the Constitution. It’s time to end or significantly change the cloture rule, as was last done in 1975, and move to a true democracy so that the House and Senate equally represent the American people.”

This report in the Hill concerns Christine Jennings of the FL-13 controversy.

The Hill offers this report, which begins: “House and Senate Democrats on Monday unveiled an ethics package they touted as the strongest reform in decades, attracting bitter criticism from Republicans who vowed to fight the bill’s altered earmark-transparency rules. The majority re-drafted the ethics bill after Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) held up conference talks by seeking assurances of the earmark language’s fate. Many provisions already approved by both chambers remained intact, including stronger disclosure rules for lobbyists and curbs on corporate jet travel.”

The Reform Institute has issued this press release on the Lopez-Torres case.