Findlaw has published my new commentary. It begins:

Our country’s multi-layered system for nominating and choosing presidential candidates is imploding. The public financing of presidential campaigns, put in place after Watergate, is in shambles, such that no top-tier candidates are expected to participate in it for the 2008 elections. Our traditional primary season, beginning with the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, is being threatened by a new rush to the front of the line by many states, with first Florida, and now Michigan, moving up their primaries to January. The move raises the spectacle of a Christmas caucus in Iowa and the Democratic Party refusing to seat Florida’s delegates at the party’s nominating convention next summer.
Meanwhile, former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson has been “testing the waters” of a presidential candidacy so long and so deeply that he’s drawn a complaint filed at the FEC claiming he’s really a presidential candidate (allowing him to get those “Law and Order” residuals before officially declaring his candidacy, an act which would force NBC to take his shows off the air under equal time rules).
Finally, and most importantly, California Republicans are trying to game the Electoral College, by placing a measure on the June 2008 election ballot which would change California’s winner-take-all method for allocating the state’s electoral college votes to a system awarding votes based on the winner of the vote for president in each California congressional district–a change which, if enacted and upheld as constitutional, could well swing a close election to a Republican candidate.
What gives? And why the implosion now? Simply put, our politics have become too sophisticated to be contained by the current laws governing our system for choosing the president. With the stakes this high, political actors would be fools not to try to game the system.