Monthly Archives: October 2013

Mark Wandering Medicine has sacrificed more than most for his country. He served six years in the US marines, fought through the bloodiest years of the Vietnam war and almost lost a leg when his scouting unit was ambushed near the North Vietnamese border in 1972. Since he returned home to the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana, however, he has received scant thanks for his service. He spent 13 years battling government bureaucrats before receiving his first disability payment. Like many Native Americans raised on desperately poor reservations in remote parts of the country, he has never lived far from the poverty line. Now he is fighting once more, this time to overcome a century and a half of disenfranchisement and secure voting rights for his fellow Native Americans. He has barely voted over the past 40 years, not because he hasn’t wanted to but because it is too difficult. The only sure way to register to vote, he says, is to make a 157-mile round trip from his home to the nearest county seat. There is no public transport, and most people can’t afford the trip – even assuming they have a working car with valid license plates and insurance, which is rarely the case. The few who do make the journey have to run a gamut of racism and hostility that, they say, can often land them in jail on charges of drunkenness and public disorder.

Ohio: Libertarians, ACLU team up to oppose “The John Kasich Re-election Protection Act” | Columbus Dispatch

Last week it appeared as if Sen. Bill Seitz and the Libertarian Party of Ohio were on the verge of a deal that would garner the party’s backing for a bill from the Cincinnati Republican revamping state law on minor political parties. But this afternoon the party issued a release saying it and the ACLU – brought on board earlier today — would be testifying against the measure Tuesday during a hearing of Senate Government Oversight and Reform Committee. The Libertarians dubbed the bill “the John Kasich Re-election Protection Act.” “This is machine-style politics at its very worst,” said party Chair Kevin Knedler in the release. He noted the bill was introduced on the same day Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Charlie Earl kicked off his campaign last month. “Kasich has stabbed fiscal conservatives, tea party activists, and libertarian Republicans in the back several times, and he’s scared to death he’ll be out of a job when they exercise their democratic right to vote for a candidate they can trust to do what’s right for Ohio.”

Virginia: Thousands stricken from voter rolls ahead of vote | HamptonRoads.com

Ebony Wright, a 37-year-old paralegal from Suffolk, has voted in the past three Virginia general elections and in two Democratic primaries. Yet on Sept. 27, Suffolk Registrar Susan Saunders sent Wright a letter saying her name had been stricken from the voting rolls because she’d moved to another state. Wright’s was one of 57,293 names on a list sent by the state Board of Elections to voter registrars across Virginia 10 weeks before the Nov. 5 election for governor, House of Delegates and city offices. State officials told registrars that simply being on the list was sufficient grounds for removal from the voting rolls. But they added that as a safeguard, registrars should carefully examine voting history and other information to make sure that the voter in question hadn’t returned to Virginia. In a lawsuit filed last week, the Virginia Democratic Party claims that the list is riddled with errors – that thousands of people on it live in Virginia and are legally entitled to vote here. The party also claims that the state failed to set uniform standards for how to handle people on the list, so local election officials are using widely different practices in deciding who to remove and what to do if they show up at the polls in November. The party holds up Wright as a prime example of the problem.

Azerbaijan: Ready for presidential elections | AzerNews

Azerbaijan is on the threshold of an important and historic event. Azerbaijani citizens will go the polls on October 9 to elect their president for a five-year term through general, direct and equal elections, by free, private and secret voting. The election campaigning of the presidential candidates will end on October 8, 24 hours before the polling starts at 08:00 on election day. The Central Election Commission (CEC) is taking a number of important steps to improve the election system and ensure the conduct of democratic, transparent, free and fair elections in Azerbaijan. It has installed web cameras in 1,000 polling stations across the country. Some countries require registration to obtain permission to follow the voting process through web cameras. But there are no restrictions in Azerbaijan in this regard. Any citizens will be able to follow the voting process online by accessing the following websites: cec.gov.az; infocenter.gov.az; e-gov.az. It will also be possible to follow the voting process via smartphone mobile devices.

India: Election Commission agrees in principle to voting machines with printouts | IBN

The Election Commission on Friday told the Supreme Court that it was in principle ready to introduce voting machines which give a printed record to voters once they exercise their franchise. The election panel said it had placed an order for 20,000 machines with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) facility and these will be introduced in a phased manner. The apex court bench of Chief Justice P Sathasivam and Justice Ranjan Gogoi accepted the commission’s stand on limitations in procurement of the new machines and said: “You try. We realise your problem. You can’t implement it in entire country (in one go).”

Maldives: Court annuls 1st round presidential vote | Associated Press

The Supreme Court of the Maldives on Monday annulled the results of the first round of voting in the country’s presidential election, agreeing with a losing candidate’s claim that the election was flawed. Four judges of a seven-member panel decided that some 5,600 votes cast in the Sept. 7 first round were tainted, making it unclear which candidates qualified for a runoff. The court ordered revoting to be completed by Nov. 3. Former President Mohamed Nasheed led the vote with more than 45 percent but failed to get the needed 50 percent. Yaamin Abdul Gayoom—brother of the South Asian country’s longtime autocratic leader Maumoon Abdul Gayoom—finished second and was to face Nasheed in the second round scheduled for Sept. 28.

Mauritania: Opposition parties to boycott legislative election | DefenceWeb

Mauritania’s main opposition parties announced a boycott of November’s legislative election on Friday after talks with the government over preparations for the vote collapsed without agreement. The Coordination of the Democratic Opposition (COD) said after three days of talks with the government that 10 of its 11 member parties had decided to boycott the vote. The talks were the first between the two sides in over four years. President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz seized power in a 2008 coup in the Islamic republic, which straddles black and Arab Africa on the continent’s west coast.

National: Supreme Court set to consider donor limits | Politico.com

Shaun McCutcheon never thought the case that bears his name would make it this far. But Tuesday, the 46-year-old electrical engineer, conservative activist and donor will watch the Supreme Court hear the case that could erase Watergate-era caps on campaign donations. McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the lawsuit challenging the total amount of money a single donor can give to all federal candidates could have far-reaching implications for the way campaigns and political parties are financed. The court’s 2010 Citizens United decision has entered the vernacular as shorthand for the explosion of money in politics. That case, along with another that allowed the creation of super PACs, led to donors writing multimillion-dollar checks. Because of the way modern campaigns are financed — by candidates partnering with federal, state and local parties — McCutcheon’s lawsuit could have the consequence of allowing politicians to ask a single donor for $1 million a pop, or more. To McCutcheon, the lawsuit is over a fundamental matter of freedom. He argues the government has no right to set overall caps on donations in the first place. To campaign-finance reformers and government watchdogs, it’s a potential nightmare — the latest in a long series of Supreme Court cases that have allowed Big Money to dominate politics.

National: Pivotal campaign finance case on U.S. high court docket | Reuters

The U.S. Supreme Court will this week step into the politically charged debate over campaign finance for the first time since its controversial ruling three years ago paved the way for corporations and unions to spend more on political candidates and causes. The case has the potential to weaken a key element of the federal campaign finance regulations remaining after the 2010 ruling, and it could pave the way for challenges to the restrictions on contributions that remain. Supporters say those laws are key to preventing wealthy donors from exerting an undue and potentially corrupting influence on the political process, while opponents say the laws choke free speech. In the 2010 case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the high court, split 5-4, lifted limits on independent expenditures, not coordinated with individual politicians or parties, by corporations and unions during federal election campaigns. This time, in a case to be argued on Tuesday, the nine justices will consider a challenge by Republican donor Shaun McCutcheon, an Alabama businessman, and the Republican National Committee to the overall limit on campaign contributions that donors can make to individual candidates and committees over a two-year federal election cycle.

Editorials: Voter ID Proponents Muddy the Waters With Misleading Georgia and North Carolina Turnout Numbers | Rob Richie/Huffington Post

The Justice Department announced this week that it will sue North Carolina over its new restrictive voting law. Although the law wiped out a range of pro-democracy measures, including FairVote priorities like instant runoff voting for judicial vacancies and voter pre-registration for young people, the lawsuit will focus specifically on the shortening of early voting periods and the requiring of government-issued photo identification in order to vote, policies the Justice Department claims illegally discriminate against racial minorities. The Civitas Institute, a North Carolina group founded by the controversial Art Pope, which had great influence in designing the law and has long pushed for strict voter ID requirements, has been highly critical of the prospective lawsuit. In a blog post this week, the organization’s election policy analyst Susan Myrick (not to be confused with former North Carolina Congresswoman Sue Myrick) claimed that the effects of restrictive voting laws on racial minorities are overblown. Unfortunately Myrick used a misleading statistic in her blog post and ignored many others that contradict her argument, just as Civitas president Francis De Luca did when he testified last spring before the North Carolina state legislature in favor of voter ID.

National: Campaign-Money Limits at Risk in New Court Term | Bloomberg

The U.S. Supreme Court term that opens next week gives the Republican-appointed majority a chance to undercut decades-old precedents in clashes over campaign finance, racial discrimination and legislative prayer. While the nine-month term lacks the blockbusters of recent years, it features “an unusually large number of cases in which the decision under review relies on a Supreme Court precedent that may be vulnerable,” said Irv Gornstein, executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University. “This term is deeper in important cases than either of the prior two terms,” Gornstein said. The court’s four Democratic appointees won major rulings in each of the last two terms, upholding President Barack Obama’s health-care law and buttressing gay marriage.

Editorials: Limiting Contributions to Candidates Deters Corruption | Rick Hasen/NYTimes.com

For almost 40 years, since the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, the Supreme Court has treated limits on campaign contributions to candidates, parties and committees more permissibly than limits on independent campaign spending when challenged on First Amendment grounds. As to contribution limits, the court’s “standard of review” has been rather lax, and most contribution limits are upheld. Spending limits are subject to “strict scrutiny,” and courts usually strike them down. Senator Mitch McConnell wants the Supreme Court in McCutcheon v. F.E.C. to overturn part of Buckley and to apply that strict standard to review of contribution limits, meaning most of them would fall too. It’s a bad idea. The closer the money comes to the hands of members of Congress, the greater the danger of corruption and undue influence of big donors.

Editorials: Campaign spending caps hurt democracy | Shaun McCutcheon/Politico.com

As a businessman from Birmingham, Ala., I could never imagine winding up where I am today. Yet here I am, the lead plaintiff in a case going before the U.S. Supreme Court this week — McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission. I expected to be focused more than full time on growing the electrical engineering firm I started from scratch 17 years ago. But when the federal government threatens your most fundamental constitutional rights — and your freedom of speech — it’s time to take a stand and get into politics. Here’s what happened: As an activist, I naturally want to donate to candidates who share my views. I was doing just that during the 2010 election cycle when an Alabama GOP committee warned I might be nearing my contribution limit. Contribution limit? That was news to me. It turns out that decades ago, Congress put a cap on two kinds of campaign giving: how much you can donate to individual candidates and committees and how much you can give in total when you add all your donations to various candidates and committees, the so-called aggregate limit. Since then, aggregate limits have become too complex and time consuming to understand, both in terms of what they are and what they really do — help incumbents self-regulate and get perpetually reelected.

California: Ten years after Gray Davis recall, California still feels effects | Los Angeles Times

Ten years ago, California erupted in an anti-government, anti-establishment convulsion unlike any ever seen. Disgruntled voters seized the chance for a rare do-over, recalling their staid and serious governor, Gray Davis, and replacing him less than a year after his reelection with one of the most famous and exuberant personalities on the planet. It was only the second time in U.S. history a sitting governor was booted from office. The spectacle — a snap election featuring a color wheel of 135 candidates, including a former child actor, a porn star and a handful of professional politicians — shook California from its usual political slumber and captivated an audience that watched from around the world. A decade on, the effects are still being felt, albeit subtly, and not the way proponents imagined, or the way actor-turned-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the chief beneficiary, so grandly promised.

Florida: Gov. Rick Scott delivers mea culpa on voter purge | Miami Herald

In a rare display of contrition coming to a Florida city near you, Gov. Rick Scott’s administration is acknowledging what civil rights groups and local elections officials had already been saying: Last year’s attempted purge of noncitizens from voter rolls was fundamentally flawed. “I accept responsibility for the effort,” Scott’s secretary of state, Ken Detzner, told the Herald/Times. “It could have been better. It should have been better.” Detzner, who serves as Scott’s top elections official, is repeating the mea culpa during a five-day road tour that concludes this week in Orlando, Sarasota and Fort Lauderdale. The apology is part of a sales pitch to the public and supervisors of elections that a second attempt to remove noncitizens from voter rolls, “Project Integrity”, will be better. “We learned from the mistakes we made,” Detzner said. “We won’t make the same mistakes.” But forgiveness is hardly automatic. While encouraged that the admission was made, some said they are hesitant to trust state officials.

North Carolina: McCrory: Cooper could be witness against NC in voter ID suit | WWAY

Gov. Pat McCrory says Attorney General Roy Cooper could wind up a witness against the state of North Carolina in a lawsuit the US Department of Justice filed against the state’s new voter ID law. “Political statements by an attorney general of any lawyer can have a detriment(al) impact on their ability to defend our state,” McCrory said. During a visit to Cape Fear Community College, McCrory, a Republican, was asked if he agrees with the opinion of one of his legal advisers that Cooper, a Democrat, compromised his ability to represent the state in the lawsuit.

Azerbaijan: The Challenges of Electoral Competition in an Oil Rich State | Washington Post

Azerbaijanis will go the polls on Oct. 9 in an atmosphere marked by a general sense of fear combined with deep apathy. Although there were signs of discontent earlier this year with a riot in a provincial town – as well as occasional unsanctioned opposition rallies in the capital Baku – these expressions of discontent with corruption and power abuse as well as grievances over rising material inequalities did not develop into a sustained popular mobilization movement. Most experts predict that the outcome of the upcoming vote is predetermined in favor of the incumbent president, Illham Aliyev, who has been in office for 10 years already. If elected, this will be his third term – a term made possible through a controversial 2009 constitutional amendment. What makes President Aliyev’s reelection an almost foregone conclusion is a reflection of the resources held by the current regime, the uncompetitive nature of the electoral process, and repression and intimidation used against regime critics.

Germany: Black-Red, Black-Green? German party coalitions and the new left majority | openDemocracy

Before the September 22 parliamentary elections, much of the foreign coverage of German politics described Angela Merkel, the incumbent candidate for chancellor, as widely tipped to win reelection. Her broad popularity among German voters seemed to exceed many observers’ ability to understand her appeal, but Merkel’s conservative party, the Christian Democratic Union, won a sweeping 41.5% of the vote, appearing to confirm pre-election predictions of success. However, the reporting on her and her opponents’ campaigns often deployed a rather simplified account of the German electoral system that has obscured the actual election outcome. It is true that Merkel won big. Her party even came close to an absolute majority in the Bundestag, which has only ever happened during the tenure of Konrad Adenauer, Germany’s first post-war chancellor and another three-term conservative legend. Merkel and her party were not expecting to reach an absolute majority, so falling short of it was not a loss for her. The disastrous defeat of her coalition partner over the last four years, the Free Democratic Party (FDP), however, will have a real effect on her next term. The FDP’s belly-flop, which resulted in its expulsion from the Bundestag for the first time in post-war history having failed to reach the necessary 5% threshhold, must have been hugely disappointing for Merkel. Then again, during the campaign season there was hushed, and sometimes explicit, speculation about the FDP’s weakness, and what political compromises Merkel would prefer to make if that party did not make it into the Bundestag. Now, Merkel’s CDU and its potential coalition partners have each held internal meetings, and while Merkel’s party is still ostensibly considering whether it would rather govern with the Social Democrats (SPD) or the Greens, it will begin preliminary discussions with the SPD this Friday.

Ireland: Voters Keep Senate Open | Wall Street Journal

Irish voters decided to retain the upper house of the country’s legislature, dealing a surprise blow to Prime Minister Enda Kenny, who had called for its closure on the grounds that it cost too much to run and did too little. At the completion of a count of votes cast in a referendum held Friday, referendum officials said 51.7% of voters decided to reject the government’s proposal to close the Senate. Mr. Kenny had cast the closure of the body as a way of ensuring politicians shared the pain of addressing Ireland’s economic problems after six years of austerity that have involved pay cuts for many public-sector workers, as well as tax hikes and a reduction in benefits and services provided by the state. It was a rare opportunity for voters in a euro-zone country to add politicians to the numbers of those who had lost their jobs, since closure of the body would have affected 60 senators. But with all declarations made late Saturday, the populous Dublin City region and eastern districts had mostly voted to reject Mr. Kenny’s proposal, with only some western electoral districts voting decisively to back the proposition. The turnout, at 39.2%, was lower than the 50% vote recorded in other major referendums.

South Korea: Court acquits 45 people over UPP election fraud scandal | Yonhap News Agency

A Seoul court on Monday acquitted 45 people on charges of proxy voting in selecting a minor opposition party’s proportional candidates ahead of last year’s April parliamentary elections. With similar cases pending in the court, legal experts expect the ruling could affect the verdicts of some 400 other people who are standing trials in connection with the Unified Progressive Party (UPP) election fraud scandal. The scandal centers around allegations that votes were cast en masse through a single Internet Protocol (IP) address in the UPP’s primary for proportional representation seats that took place in March 2012. IP addresses, the online equivalent of a street address or a phone number, should be different for each voter. Multiple or proxy voting allegedly happened with offline ballots as well.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly September 30 – October 6 2013

October 6, 2013

Voters wearing traditional Bavarian dress cast their ballots in German general election at polling station in Gaissach The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in McCutcheon vs. FEC, which challenges the aggregate spending rules that limit any one campaign contributor to $123,000 in total spending to political candidates and election committees during any two-year federal election cycle. The disclosure of all campaign contributions has been delayed by the government shutdown. Nate Cohn considers the actual effect of gerrymandering on political polarization. Voter purges have raised controversy in Florida and Virginia. The Department of Justice has announced plans to sue the the state of North Carolina for what many civil rights advocates have called the worst voter suppression law in the nation. Olga Kazan considered the structural and cultural differences between elections in Germany and the US and claims of vote rigging followed delays in announcing the results of Guinea’s legislative election.

Editorials: The Great Gerrymander of 2012 | Sam Wang/New York Times

October 5, 2013

Having the first modern democracy comes with bugs. Normally we would expect more seats in Congress to go to the political party that receives more votes, but the last election confounded expectations. Democrats received 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans won control of the House by a 234 to 201 margin. This is only the second such reversal since World War II. Using statistical tools that are common in fields like my own, neuroscience, I have found strong evidence that this historic aberration arises from partisan disenfranchisement. Although gerrymandering is usually thought of as a bipartisan offense, the rather asymmetrical results may surprise you. Through artful drawing of district boundaries, it is possible to put large groups of voters on the losing side of every election. The Republican State Leadership Committee, a Washington-based political group dedicated to electing state officeholders, recently issued aprogress report on Redmap, its multiyear plan to influence redistricting. The $30 million strategy consists of two steps for tilting the playing field: take over state legislatures before the decennial Census, then redraw state and Congressional districts to lock in partisan advantages. The plan was highly successful.

National: Supreme Court case could give wealthy donors more latitude in elections | The Washington Post

The very wealthy could play a much greater role in funding federal candidates and political parties if the Supreme Court rules that a key campaign finance restriction adopted after Watergate is unconstitutional. Under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the court already has junked a number of election spending limits as improper restrictions on political expression — perhaps most dramatically with its 2010 Citizens United decision, which wiped out the ban on corporate election spending. A bold and broad decision by the court in one of its first cases of the new term, Shaun McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, which the justices are to hear Tuesday, could overturn decades of precedent about the remaining power the government has to limit contributions to candidates and parties.

National: The next ‘Citizens United’ is coming your way | Los Angeles Times

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in a campaign finance case that could be even bigger than the last one, the infamous Citizens United case of 2010. The new case, McCutcheon vs. FEC, challenges the aggregate spending rules that limit any one campaign contributor to $123,000 in total spending to political candidates and election committees during any two-year federal election cycle. The aggregate limit long has been a check on the flow of cold hard cash into the electoral system. As a three-judge panel of federal district court in Washington, D.C., observed last year, the per-candidate contribution limits in federal law — including $2,500 per election to any given candidate, $30,800 per year to each political party — would allow an individual to spread up to $3.5 million around. That’s a lot of bunce. The $123,000 ceiling effectively limits that donor to backing no more than 18 individual candidates in any cycle, the D.C. court noted.

National: Supreme Court weighs limits on campaign donations | USAToday

Alabama businessman Shaun McCutcheon says he doesn’t want to give gobs of money to a single politician. Instead, he hopes to spread smaller contributions to as many candidates as possible. If he has his way in a case headed to the Supreme Court on Tuesday, however, a single donor could contribute more than $3 million to a political party, its state and federal chapters and all of its federal candidates to shape next year’s midterm elections for Congress, campaign-finance watchdogs warn. His case, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, is the latest round in the bitter national battle over the role of money in American politics and the biggest challenge to campaign-finance rules since the court’s bombshell 2010 Citizens United decision ended restrictions on independent political spending by corporations and unions. The new legal fight targets a cornerstone of election rules: the ability of the government to regulate the amount of money individuals can give to presidential and congressional candidates and political parties.

National: Government Shutdown May Mean No Disclosure Of Campaign Finance Before Special Elections | ThinkProgress

As the government shutdown continues to prevent all “non-essential” federal employees from doing their jobs, the Federal Election Commission’s operations have been particularly hard hit. With all but four of the agency’s employees furloughed until the shutdown’s end, voters in Alabama, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and New Jersey may not have any opportunity to see who is contributing to and running ads in support of the candidates. According to a Center for Public Integrity report, only the four currently-serving FEC Commissioners are considered essential. While parts of the agency’s electronic campaign finance disclosure system are automated, FEC Chairwoman Ellen Weintraub noted that no one will be around to resolve any glitches, computer crashes, or other parts of the disclosure process that require human action. “I don’t know how to personally post the reports — I’m a little out of my league there,” she noted, adding, “The public will have to go without disclosures until we open back up.”

National: Study: Curbing Voting Rights Act could reverse black voters’ gains | Al Jazeera

The Supreme Court’s decision to restrict the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 legislation that prohibits discrimination against voters on the basis of race or color, could harm African-American political representation at the city council level, a new study says. The study found that municipalities with the strongest gains in black political representation were those protected by a provision of the Voting Rights Act that was invalidated by the Supreme Court in June. Some experts say the new study shows that the Court’s decision could reverse the gains that black voters have made as a result of the act, or at least impede further progress. The study, to be published this month in the upcoming issue of The Journal of Politics, is among the first on the act’s effectiveness on black political representation, according to researchers at Rice University, Ohio University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Its conclusion is clear: The Voting Rights Act explains much of the electoral success of black candidates in city elections – and those gains could be at risk.

National: Campaign Contributions Go Into the Shadows During Shutdown | National Journal

There are four people working at the Federal Election Commission during the shutdown. There are usually 339. This is the agency that’s meant to shine a light on campaign contributions and expenditures, to let the people know who is paying for the attack ads flooding their television screens as Election Day approaches. Campaign contributions are going into the dark. Campaigns can still file electronically, but if the system breaks, there will be no one around to fix the problem. “And it is possible that technological problems may arise that would prevent filers from filing on time,” FEC’s website states.

National: Mitch McConnell Will Ask Supreme Court To Scrap Campaign Contribution Limits Entirely | Huffington Post

On Oct. 8, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will argue to the Supreme Court that all campaign contribution limits should be eliminated and that candidates should be able to accept unlimited donations. Although McConnell is not a party in the case of McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court has granted the Senate minority leader time during oral argument to present his views: that campaign contribution limits are an unconstitutional burden on free speech and that the court should give contribution limits a higher level of scrutiny than it has in the past. McConnell will be represented by lawyer Bobby Burchfield. McCutcheon v. FEC challenges the aggregate limit on donations to federal candidates, political parties and political action committees, which bars an individual donor from giving more than $123,200 in total during the 2014 election cycle. McConnell wants to go much further by forcing courts to treat all campaign contribution limits as they treat campaign expenditure limits, which were found to be an unconstitutional burden on First Amendment rights in the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision.

Editorials: Quit Blaming Gerrymandering for the Shutdown | Nate Cohn/New Republic