Once again it has been a busy year for the Election Law Blog and 2013 promises some big news as well in the area of voting rights, campaign finance, filibuster reform/political polarization and other topics.
i wish all my readers a safe, healthy and happy 2013.
Below the fold you’ll find a list of books, articles, and opeds that I’ve published (or that were released in draft) in 2012. Thanks for reading!
USA Today reports: “In 2008, the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program snared four cases involving six people who voted for president in both Arizona and in another state. Earlier this year, Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett said the program had found 10 people who appeared to have voted twice in the 2010 election. Those cases are still under investigation, and the voters face possible prosecution. Work has not begun on cross-referencing voting information from the 2012 elections.”
[A]s many as 49,000 people across Central Florida were discouraged from voting because of long lines on Election Day, according to a researcher at Ohio State University who analyzed election data compiled by the Orlando Sentinel.
About 30,000 of those discouraged voters — most of them in Orange and Osceola counties — likely would have backed Democratic President Barack Obama, according to Theodore Allen, an associate professor of industrial engineering at OSU.
About 19,000 voters would have likely backed Republican Mitt Romney, Allen said.
This suggests that Obama’s margin over Romney in Florida could have been roughly 11,000 votes higher than it was, based just on Central Florida results. Obama carried the state by 74,309 votes out of more than 8.4 million cast.
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 low was 333 in the 104th Congress (1995-1996). Throughout its history, of course, Congress has always been a dysfunctional place; in fact, the Founding Fathers ensured it that way (with the federal government’s checks and balances). But this particular Congress, which comes to an end on Jan. 3, has been uniquely dysfunctional. Just consider: the current fiscal-cliff debate, the debt-ceiling standoff of 2011 that resulted in an S&P credit downgrade, the Super Committee’s failure, the near government shutdown in the spring of 2011, the defeat of the U.N. Disabilities treaty, etc. With the debt ceiling, the fiscal cliff, and the near government shutdown, it’s hard not to conclude that Congress has been an active player in the sluggishness of the U.S. economy.
George Will: “While accusing the Supreme Court’s conservative justices of “disdain for democracy,” Pamela S. Karlan proves herself talented at dispensing disdain. The Stanford law professor is, however, less talented at her chosen task of presenting a coherent understanding of judicial review. Still, her “Democracy and Disdain” in the November issue of the Harvard Law Review usefully illustrates progressivism’s consistent disdain for the Founders’ project of limiting government.”
Louis Michael Seidman has written this NYT oped, which begins: “AS the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.”
Peter Overby reports for NPR.
WaPo: “In 2007, in the wake of the biggest lobbying scandal in decades, Congress limited the ability of family members to lobby their relatives in the House or Senate. But it declined to ban the practice entirely. Since then, 56 relatives of lawmakers have been paid to influence Congress. More than 500 firms have spent more than $400 million on lobbying teams that include the relatives of members, according to a Washington Post analysis of disclosure forms.”
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 has, however, been an increase in partisanship in the House, and it truly is ‘asymmetrical’. The Republican House caucus has been becoming more conservative every year since 1977, whether or not House Republicans are winning or losing elections. Republicans have climbed from 0.4 on the DW nominate scales after the 1992 elections to near 0.7 in the last congress. That type of charge towards polarization is historically unusual over data that stretches back 130 years.”
Likewise, Senate Republicans “have slowly and become more conservative in their roll call votes by moving from about 0.3 to 0.5 on the scale.”
NYT: “A bipartisan group of eight senators on Friday proposed a detailed set of Senate rule changes that could speed the legislative process considerably but would stop short of the most dramatic changes to the filibuster that some Democrats are demanding.”
Alaska Dispatch: “U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, is teaming with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., to clean up the indulgent and secretive excesses of so-called political Super PACs. She’s pledged to take on the project early in the 113th Congress, and co-authored with Wyden an opinion piece on the subject published in the Washington Post.”
AP reports from Kansas.