Sunday, January 31st, 2010
Dorothy Samuels, THE NEW YORK TIMES, 1/29/10. WASHINGTON DC — As I read over last week’s aggressively wrong 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision greatly escalating the power of corporate and union money in elections, my thoughts turned to former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
That is not just because the ruling is another reminder of the court’s rightward shift since Justice O’Connor was replaced by the starkly conservative Justice Samuel Alito. Since retiring, Justice O’Connor has been warning about the threat to judicial independence from big-money state judicial campaigns and attack ads paid for by special interests hoping to influence future court decisions. The Citizens United ruling promises to make that problem worse, possibly much worse.
Thirty-nine states hold judicial elections. Between 2000 and 2009, State Supreme Court candidates raised $205.8 million, according to the Justice at Stake Campaign, a watchdog group that monitors money in court races. That was more than double the $84.9 million raised the previous decade. One immediate result of the Citizens United ruling, as Justice John Paul Stevens noted in dissent, is that these states “may no longer have the ability to place modest limits on corporate electioneering even if they believe such limits to be critical to maintaining the integrity of their judicial systems.” Read More
Friday, January 29th, 2010
David W. Jones, NEWS-HERALD, 1/27/10. COLUMBUS — For about the third or fourth time, the GOP-majority U.S. Supreme Court justifies funded election campaign attacks as free speech and OK. Favoring an appeal by a group called “Citizens United,” the U.S. SUPCO voted, 5-4, last week to uphold political spending by corporations, unions, lobbyists and political action committees. Corporation and union money, PACs and all?
Nationally, Ohio and Florida now will be the top two “states that can expect the biggest and most sudden infusion of money,” the New York Times quotes experts. Read More
Friday, January 29th, 2010
Aaron Blake, THE HILL, 1/27/10. WASHINGTON DC — If Republicans are to make significant gubernatorial gains in 2010, the wave will start in the heart of the Rust Belt. Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania loom as big bellwether states with huge redistricting implications. Democrats also happen to hold all three — a factor they admit will work against them. Read More
Friday, January 29th, 2010
Bara Vaida, Peter H. Stone, NATIONAL JOURNAL, 1/29/10. WASHINGTON DC — “Wild West On K Street?”: The controversial Supreme Court ruling on campaign advertising has shoved aside Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown’s surprising Senate win as the hottest topic of conversation on K Street. All across town, lobbyists and campaign consultants, media consultants, and pollsters discussed how and whether clients should take advantage of the January 21 Supreme Court decision, which ended a ban on direct spending by corporations and unions in political elections.
Friday, January 29th, 2010
Steven Carbo, Scott Novakowski, David Myers, Youjin B. Kim, DEMOS, 1/27/10. Much of the information necessary for a voter to become registered, contained within databases maintained by public assistance agencies, provides a solid foundation for implementing an automatic voter registration system. WASHINGTON DC – In response to calls for voter registration modernization, proposals have been advanced to use client and applicant lists from government agencies to automatically register eligible citizens to vote. A central goal of any automatic voter registration proposal should be a representative electorate in which all eligible citizens, including those from historically underrepresented communities, are effectively registered and able to cast a ballot on Election Day. State databases of individuals receiving public assistance benefits–including SNAP (formerly Food Stamps), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Medicaid–can be an important source for registering low-income citizens–one of the most under-registered segments of the population.
To better understand the nature of public assistance agencies’ computerized eligibility databases and their ability to facilitate automatic voter registration, Demos conducted telephone interviews with public assistance agencies in 41 out of 51 states (including the District of Columbia). Read More
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