…cCain’s. Senator McCain’s only role was to urge all parties to resolve the deadlock. Second, it has seemed inappropriate for me to comment on the specific composition of the FEC since it is well-known that matters involving the McCain campaign are before the Commission, and thus before whoever is ultimately confirmed. However, now that Rick has publicly prodded me, I expect continued silence would be taken as an unwillingness to engage, with adver…
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…ing system to make it a viable alternative to privately-run campaigns, and to the President and the members of the Senate, who have failed to break a deadlock over a controversial nominee to the Federal Election Commission….
Continue reading…e up-or-down vote in the Senate on von Spakovsky helped cement the current deadlock. Rather than face defeat in the Senate on the von Spakovsky nomination, McConnell chose to torpedo two other FEC nominees who suffered from none of the infirmities that plagued von Spakovsky. One press report from yesterday showed that even von Spakovsky knows his confirmation is not going to happen. In an e-mail reportedly sent New Year’s Eve, the day his recess a…
Continue reading…with a majority required in order to grant preclearance. In the event of a deadlock, the dispute would ultimately wind up in court. This would probably drive up the costs of preclearance, since more cases would likely be resolved judicially rather than administratively. On the other hand, it would guard against the considerable risk of partisan manipulation, especially false positives, that exists under the current process. As I’ve discussed at gr…
Continue reading…. It seems pretty clear, as Judge Posner acknowledged in his “Breaking the Deadlock” book, that more Florida voters intended to vote for Gore than for Bush. But not all of those voters translated their private intent into a valid vote that could be accurately counted using Florida’s then-existing voting technology. 2. For all practical purposes, the Florida count was a statistical tie. Various commentators have summed the problem up by noting that…
Continue reading…ortion. Specter may actually provide the only hope of breaking some of the deadlock over judicial confirmations. If he is not chair, Larry Solum may well be right that we face a downward spiral over the process, which could well lead to a change in the Senate filibuster rules and a breakdown of work at the Senate. I won’t be sending my blog posts on confirmation issues to the election law list because this is just not germane enough to the topic o…
Continue reading…ant votes were the 4-2 vote against the Toner-Thomas proposal, and the 3-3 deadlock on adopting the Toner-Thomas allocation rules. This leaves the FEC with at least another 90 days before they come back to decide what, if anything, to do about the issue. Press coverage of yesterday’s action is as follows: The New York Times (and see this editorial) The Washington Post The Wall Street Journal (thanks to Steven Sholk for the link) The Los Angeles Ti…
Continue reading…Roll Call offers this report (paid subscription required), which begins: “In a last-ditch effort to craft a compromise for the increasingly rancorous debate over 527 groups, one Republican and one Democrat on the Federal Election Commission have unveiled a new proposal to regulate the controversial organizations that are poised to spend millions of largely unregulated dollars on this fall…
Continue reading…gree on the appropriate rules. It is certainly possible that the FEC could deadlock 3-3 on some or most of these issues. But it is also possible that a majority will craft some sort of compromise. The draft raises literally dozens of questions for comment, but perhaps the most important one appears on page 6: [T]he Commission seeks comment on whether the effective date of any final rules that the Commission may adopt should be delayed until after…
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