“We all remember Bush v. Gore.” –Senator Mitch McConnell, urging Norm Coleman to take his Minnesota Senate election contest all the way to the United States Supreme Court if necessary. The trial just ended.

I’ve already blogged about Justice Kennedy’s reliance on the canon of constitutional avoidance in his recent plurality opinion in Bartlett v. Strickland. I was just looking over that discussion in the case again, and I was struck by the sentence… Continue reading

BNA Money & Politics Report offers this report ($).

From this report (very critical of AEI): “Norm Ornstein, the congressional scholar whose centrist work clashes with the neoconservative image of the think tank, was told last year by the Carnegie Foundation to look elsewhere for money to fund his… Continue reading

here.

MPR offers this report.

This is not a post about EFCA, a subject about which I know embarrassingly little. Instead, it is about this decision of a California Court of Appeal today, holding that elections held pursuant to Proposition 218 must be conducted… Continue reading

Justice Grodin has written this article for the California Journal of Politics and Policy. Jesse Choper also has an article on Prop. 8’s retroactivity.

I’ve just received a final bound copy of Heather Gerken, The Democracy Index: Why Our Election System Is Failing and How to Fix It (Princeton 2009). I am in the process of writing a review of this very important book,… Continue reading

In this post, I questioned the constitutionality under the 17th Amendment of proposed congressional legislation requiring states to hold an election to fill an open Senate seat within 90 days of the vacancy. I did not see this as… Continue reading

Here.

The LA Times offers this report.

The all night session must have been a great bonding experience for everyone.