Arizona: State heading back to Supreme Court over voter ID law | New York Amsterdam News

The state of Arizona wants the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the appeal by the federal government of a law that would allow them to practice their own enforcement regarding immigrants. Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld Arizona’s requirement that voters show identification at the polls, but disallowed the requirement to show proof of U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote in federal elections. Known as SB 1070, the law, if overturned by the court, would allow Arizona’s law enforcement officials to arrest and detain individuals who might be undocumented immigrants without any federal oversight or regard for federal priorities. Under the law, failure to comply with registration requirements would result in an inability to vote in elections.

National: Romney super PAC’s $400K gift among mysterious donations this election cycle | The Washington Post

A once-mysterious $400,000 check written to a “super” political action committee supporting Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign rekindled a nagging question this election season: Just how much disclosure is enough to satisfy transparency? The Florida husband and wife behind the contribution were identified Monday as the beneficiaries of an investment fund and are among Romney’s top Florida fundraisers. But up until then, the donation to the Restore Our Future super PAC — which reported the contribution from an unknown Florida firm called SeaSpray Partners LLC — left more questions than answers. Inquiries about the donation intensified over the weekend after a Florida man who owned a similarly named company in Palm Beach told news organizations he never donated to the pro-Romney group. It turned out that Restore Our Future listed the wrong address for the actual SeaSpray donor.

Editorials: How to beat Citizens United | E.J. Dionne/The Washington Post

We are about to have the worst presidential campaign money can buy. The Supreme Court’s dreadful Citizens United decision and a somnolent Federal Election Commission will allow hundreds of millions of dollars from a small number of very wealthy people and interests to inundate our airwaves with often vicious advertisements for which no candidate will be accountable. One would like to think that the court will eventually admit the folly of its 2010 ruling and reverse it. But we can’t wait that long. And out of this dreary landscape, hope is blossoming in the state of New York. There’s irony here, since New York is where a lot of the big national money is coming from. No matter. The state is considering a campaign finance law that would repair some of the Citizens United damage, and in a way the Supreme Court wouldn’t be able to touch.

Editorials: “Corporate Personhood” Is Not the Problem | Garret Epps/American Prospect

American politics is in trouble. A tsunami of unaccountable, untraceable political money is overwhelming the Republican race for the presidential nomination and threatens to do the same to the fall election. For many people, especially progressives, the culprit is easy to name: the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which swept away any limits on election-advocacy ads by corporations, unions, and “independent” political-action committees (PACs) and issue groups. Many progressives believe that Citizens United “made corporations people” and that a constitutional amendment restricting “corporate personhood” will cure this political ill. Citizens United is a bad decision. This obvious fact may even be dawning on the Court’s conservative majority, which is taking a surprisingly leisurely look at American Tradition Partnership, Inc. v. Bullock, in which the Montana Supreme Court directly challenged Citizens United, in essence telling the justices that they didn’t understand the first thing about politics. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, dissenters in Citizens United, have publicly stated that American Tradition may offer an opening to limit or even overturn the malign precedent.

Montana: Supreme Court agrees to consider corporate free speech post-Citizen United | UPI.com

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consider taking another bite of the corporate political free speech apple recently, accepting a petition asking justices to summarily overturn a Montana Supreme Court decision petitioners say flies in the face of Citizens United. Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission is the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision two years ago that basically negated campaign finance laws. In its ruling, the court said Congress shouldn’t be allowed to limit the amount corporations, unions and similar entities give to campaigns. In upholding a ban on corporate independent expenditures in state elections, the Montana Supreme Court determined that “unlike Citizens United, this case concerns Montana law, Montana elections and it arises from Montana history.” That ruling, the petition said, raises the question for the U.S. Supreme Court to consider: “Whether Montana is bound by the holding of Citizens United, that a ban on corporate independent political expenditures is a violation of the First Amendment, when the ban applies to state, rather than federal, elections.”

National: Attorneys General urge Congress to check corporate spending on elections | SouthCoastToday.com

Concerned about unlimited contributions by corporations for political advertising, Attorney General Martha Coakley has submitted a formal letter to Congress urging an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to reverse the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The letter sent today to Congressional leadership was signed by AG Coakley and 10 other state Attorneys General.

Editorials: Super PACs can be thwarted, even with ‘Citizens United’ | The Washington Post

Here is the only good news about the super PACs flooding the 2012 presidential race with negative ads funded by huge contributions from the super rich: These vehicles for corruption can be eliminated. Congress can pass legislation to end these candidate-specific super PACs that is well within the bounds of Citizens United. The Supreme Court’s decision in the 2010 case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission paved the way for the creation of super PACs — federally registered political action committees that raise unlimited contributions and use these funds to make expenditures in federal elections. To legally spend these funds, the court said, outside groups must operate independently of the candidates they are supporting. The 2012 presidential campaign has brought us a particularly virulent form of these groups: the candidate-specific super PAC. If not made illegal, they will spread to congressional races as well.

Editorials: The Virtues of the Super PAC | NYTimes.com

With the Republican primary season winding down, it’s time to celebrate two heroes of participatory democracy, two champions of the ordinary voter, two men who did everything in their power to make the ballot box matter as much as the fundraising circuit. I speak, of course, of Sheldon Adelson and Foster Friess. Adelson is the casino billionaire whose super PAC donations enabled Newt Gingrich to upset Mitt Romney in South Carolina and give him a scare in Florida. Friess is the investment manager whose super PAC donations enabled Rick Santorum to prolong the race through February and March. Both men are controversial; both have been cited as prime examples of the corrupting influence of great wealth on our politics. But both did more than anyone else to prevent the Republican primary from turning into a straightforward “money talks” affair.

Editorials: Don’t Blame The Supreme Court For Citizens United — Blame Congress, The FEC And The IRS | Huffington Post

The two most controversial campaign financing practices of the post-Citizens United era aren’t actually the Supreme Court’s fault. The court’s conservative majority most certainly expected that its 2010 ruling, which granted First Amendment rights to corporations and equated money to speech, would unleash unprecedented amounts of political spending. But when people rail against Citizens United these days, they’re often complaining about two things in particular: the candidate-specific super PACs that implausibly claim to be independent of the candidates they’re backing, and the political slush funds that can accept unlimited secret donations by claiming to be issue-oriented nonprofits. Neither were inevitable byproducts of Citizens United — or a subsequent lower court ruling. They are things that could be fixed either legislatively, administratively, or both. But without a good shove, Congress, the Federal Election Commission and the Internal Revenue Service all appear unlikely to pursue solutions.

Voting Blogs: Foreign Corporations, Non-profits and the Holding of Citizens United | Money, Politics and the Law

Days after Citizens United v. FEC was decided, President Obama famously said at his 2010 State of the Union address that he believed the decision would “open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limits in our elections.”  There may be loopholes which allow foreign corporations to donate through American entities, but not only arecorporations generally not funding super PACs, the ban on money accepted directly from foreign corporations appears to be being followed.  Last month, Rick Santorum’s super PAC returned a $50,000 donation from such a corporation. The Internal Revenue Service has also said non-profit organizations under 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code (which applies to charitable organizations) are banned from contributing to super PACs.  (In contrast, non-profit social welfare organizations organized under Section 501(c)(4) of the Code may donate to political causes as long as that is not their main activity.  Professor Rick Hasen has more on 501(c) non-profit donations after Citizens United)  This ban from the IRS led to Mitt Romney’s super PACrefunding a $100,000 check from a 501(c)(3) charity. But here’s the important question from a legal standpoint: under the holding of Citizens United, should either of these bans be constitutional?

Voting Blogs: Montana Supreme Court leading the charge against Citizens United | State of Elections

Last month the Supreme Court issued a stay on Montana’s Supreme Court decision upholding corporate spending limits in state elections. It seems that the Court may be ready to reexamine Citizens United. What they’ll find is what many states have been saying all along: Citizens United is out of sync with the values of many states. Montana was the first of many states to express disdain for unlimited corporate funding. Early last week 55 towns in Vermont passed resolutions proposing a constitutional amendment that would limit the rights of corporations. The Alabama legislature has also been seeking to stop PAC-to-PAC fund transfers that mask donors. Even some members of the Court seem eager to reexamine the effects of Citizens United.

National: Rules of the Game: Bad News for Nation’s Nonprofits | Roll Call

In an election that until lately has been dominated by super PACs, politically active nonprofits are the new bad guys, drawing ethics complaints, letters to the IRS and legislative action. That is bad news for the nation’s 1.6 million nonprofits, which have much to lose as their sector gets dragged into political money controversies. For reform advocates, the problem with big-spending, secretive nonprofits is that they answer to no one and keep voters in the dark. But the worst damage inflicted by unrestricted, undisclosed campaign money could be on nonprofits themselves. “Charitable organizations depend on the confidence and trust of the public for support,” said Diana Aviv, president and CEO of Independent Sector, which represents the nonprofit and philanthropic community. Campaign spending by nonprofits, she added, could pose “a serious reputational risk” to the sector.

National: Could Corporations Take Tax Breaks on Political ‘Dark Money’? | ProPublica

The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision opened the way for unlimited corporate spending on politics and has led to the proliferation of nonprofit political groups that do not have to disclose the identities of their donors. But corporations may be getting another benefit from anonymous donations to these groups: a break on their taxes. It all starts with the so-called social welfare groups that have become bigger players in the political world in the wake of Citizens United, which knocked down restrictions on campaign activity by such groups. Tax experts say it’s possible that businesses are using an aggressive interpretation of the law to wring a tax advantage out of their donations to these groups. It’s almost impossible to know whether that’s happening, partly because the groups — also known by their IRS designation as 501(c)(4)s — aren’t required to disclose their donors. (That’s why the contributions have been dubbed “dark money.”)

Minnesota: Court fight inevitable for Minnesota voter ID | StarTribune.com

Even if the Legislature approves the measure as a constitutional amendment, opponents vow to try and keep it off November ballot. The turmoil and contention surrounding voting rights and election integrity does not cease when a state adopts the type of photo ID requirement Minnesota is moving toward. It just moves into the courtrooms. Two Wisconsin district court judges blocked the state’s strict, new ID requirement this month, after just a single election. One judge said a government that limits the right to vote “imperils its legitimacy.” The state is appealing. In Texas and South Carolina, concerns dating back to the Civil Rights era have caused the federal government to block ID laws, fearing minority voters will be disenfranchised. Those states are appealing. Even Indiana and Georgia, two states with the longest history of using strict photo ID requirements, had to battle multiple legal challenges, culminating in a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the Indiana law as being in “the interest in deterring and detecting voter fraud.”

Minnesota: Court fight inevitable for Minnesota voter ID | StarTribune.com

Even if the Legislature approves the measure as a constitutional amendment, opponents vow to try and keep it off November ballot. The turmoil and contention surrounding voting rights and election integrity does not cease when a state adopts the type of photo ID requirement Minnesota is moving toward. It just moves into the courtrooms. Two Wisconsin district court judges blocked the state’s strict, new ID requirement this month, after just a single election. One judge said a government that limits the right to vote “imperils its legitimacy.” The state is appealing. In Texas and South Carolina, concerns dating back to the Civil Rights era have caused the federal government to block ID laws, fearing minority voters will be disenfranchised. Those states are appealing. Even Indiana and Georgia, two states with the longest history of using strict photo ID requirements, had to battle multiple legal challenges, culminating in a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the Indiana law as being in “the interest in deterring and detecting voter fraud.”

Editorials: The Supreme Court and Citizens United, Take 2 | NYTimes.com

The Supreme Court has an opportunity to reconsider its disastrous Citizens United decision. The justices should take it. The damaging effects of unlimited spending by corporations and unions on elections — honestly examined — should cause the court to overturn or, at the very least, limit that ruling. On Friday, the justices granted a stay of a Montana state court ruling that upheld a state anticorruption campaign finance law. The stay gives the parties in the Montana case time to file papers to seek Supreme Court review. In supporting the stay, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, “Montana’s experience, and experience elsewhere since this court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission make it exceedingly difficult to maintain that independent expenditures by corporations ‘do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.’ ” She was quoting Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Citizens United, in which he claimed that expenditures might result in “influence over or access to elected officials” but would not “corrupt” them.

Montana: Judge indicates part of initiative on Montana Supreme Court elections invalid | The Missoulian

A District Court judge indicated Wednesday that a portion of a Republican-backed ballot initiative, which many in the GOP hope will tilt Montana Supreme Court elections to their party’s favor, could be unconstitutional as alleged by critics. The Legislature last year sent the initiative directly to this June’s primary ballot. It establishes regional districts that would each elect one justice to the state’s high court. The court’s six justices and one chief justice are currently elected in statewide elections. Supporters argued that justices elected statewide favor Democrats and do not represent certain places, like the rural areas that generally favor Republicans. Opponents argued Wednesday in District Court in Helena that the proposal runs afoul of the Montana Constitution by adding qualification criteria for the judicial candidates. They are asking the courts to remove it from the ballot.

Illinois: Federal judge says super PACs not bound by Illinois limits on contributions | chicagotribune.com

Political action committees that act independently of a candidate are not bound by Illinois’ limits on campaign contributions aimed at curbing corruption, a federal judge ruled Tuesday. In a case brought by the abortion rights group Personal PAC, U.S. District Judge Marvin Aspen ruled the organization could create its own independent-expenditure PAC and take unlimited contributions. Aspen found that previous rulings by the U.S. Supreme Courtand the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago “prohibit governments from enforcing limiting contributions to independent-expenditure-only PACs.”

National: The Super PAC Paradox | Roll Call

When GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum gave his victory speech in Missouri after the primary there on Feb. 7, he shared the stage with a white-haired gentleman who stood practically at his elbow the entire time.
Investment fund manager Foster Friess probably did not strike audience members as someone special as he smiled merrily behind the former Pennsylvania Senator. But Friess is at the center of a growing controversy over unregulated money and alleged campaign finance violations in the 2012 campaign. At issue is whether unrestricted super PACs are illegally working hand-in-hand with the candidates they support. Campaign finance watchdogs say the collusion is flagrant. Super PAC organizers argue just as loudly that they are meticulously following the rules.

National: Voting Rights Act: Is Obama letting the civil rights law die before the Supreme Court kills it? | Slate

When Georgia’s Republican leaders redrew the state’s election-district maps last year, Democrats and minorities instantly cried foul. In an increasingly diverse state where 47 percent of voters chose Obama in 2008, the new maps looked likely to hand the GOP 10 of the state’s 14 seats in Congress. Perhaps even more significantly, they were drawn so as to give Republicans a shot at a two-thirds majority in both chambers of the state legislature, allowing them to pass constitutional amendments unilaterally. They achieved this in part by “packing” the state’s black voters (who overwhelmingly vote Democratic) into a handful of districts in order to make others more solidly white (and Republican).

Fortunately for the state’s Democrats, federal law seemed to offer a time-tested remedy. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark civil rights bill passed in 1965 to crack down on poll taxes and other discriminatory practices, requires Georgia and a number of other Southern states to get federal approval for any changes to their voting laws. Any that harmed minorities’ chances of fair representation were to be thrown out. And that’s exactly what Georgia Democrats expected Obama’s Department of Justice to do with Republicans’ new maps. Just two years earlier, it had invoked Section 5 to block two Georgia voter-verification laws. Liberals gleefully predicted the Republican gerrymanders would likewise be “DOA at the DOJ.”

Editorials: Undermining State Campaign Laws | NYTimes.com

On Friday, a federal district judge granted a preliminary injunction against a Montana law, the Corrupt Practices Act of 1912, that bans corporations from making independent expenditures in political campaigns. Earlier this month, the United States Supreme Court, in a separate case from the state courts, issued a temporary order preventing Montana from enforcing that law. These cases and others in the country show how the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has upended important state campaign spending laws. As the Montana Supreme Court has said on this question, “Clearly the impact of unlimited corporate donations creates a dominating impact on the political process and inevitably minimizes the impact of individual citizens.”

Indiana: State Supreme Court hears election challenge to Charlie White | The Indianapolis Star

The Indiana Supreme Court raised several questions about voter registration laws during a hearing Wednesday to determine if Charlie White was eligible to run for secretary of state in 2010. But those questions might not be enough for the state’s highest court to order White’s removal from the office. The Indiana Supreme Court has never ousted an elected official because of an election challenge. Supreme Court justices typically defer to voters, said Joel Schumm, a professor at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. It seems likely they will do so in this case, Schumm said, especially since White’s voting issues were well-publicized before the election, and he won by a large margin anyway. If the Supreme Court rules against White, the Democrat who lost to him by more than 300,000 votes in November 2010 could take office.

Montana: Citizens United Part II: Montana Supreme Court Collides With U.S. Supreme Court | Huffington Post

The fate of Montana’s century-old ban on corporate political spending is now in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court, setting up a possible sequel to the hotly contested Citizens United decision handed down two years ago. In 2010, a five-member majority of the U.S. Supreme Court declared that corporations’ independent spending in elections does not corrupt — or even appear to corrupt — the political process. On Wednesday, Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock submitted a brief to the Court with facts that suggest otherwise as he urged the justices to uphold his state’s ban on corporate political spending.

Texas: Partial deal reached in Texas redistricting case | The Statesman

The Texas attorney general’s office and a coalition of minority groups announced a deal Wednesday on one of three disputed electoral maps, a step forward in resolving when Texas will hold its primary elections. Texas holds the country’s second largest number of delegates in the presidential race, but is unlikely to influence the Republican nomination because a dispute over the state’s political maps has pushed back the primary, originally scheduled to be part of next month’s Super Tuesday contests. Election administrators told a three-judge panel that the soonest reasonable date now is May 22.

Voting Blogs: Super PAC Disclosure Statements Disclose Little | Brennan Center for Justice

One might guess that groups with names like Restore Our Future, Priorities USA, and Winning Our Future would all be campaigning for the same thing — but that could not be further from the truth. These similarly named groups are the Super PACs who are fighting each other in the presidential election. Their confusing names are paltry in comparison to the biggest concern: many of their real donors remain hidden from the public eye. With unlimited contributions made possible by the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and subsequent court decisions, the groups have already raised millions of dollars from wealthy individuals, corporations, unions, and nonprofits. While President Obama is not immune from the Super PAC trend, the Republican nominees have raised more money in much larger amounts. Twelve billionaires donated to Restore Our Future, the Super PAC supporting Mitt Romney, with contributions ranging from $50,000 to $1 million.

Alabama: Is it bribery or just politics? | The Washington Post

All elected officials, and those who help finance elections in the expectation that certain promises will be kept — and everyone who cares about the rule of law — should hope the Supreme Court agrees to hear Don Siegelman’s appeal of his conviction. Until the court clarifies what constitutes quid pro quo political corruption, Americans engage in politics at their peril because prosecutors have dangerous discretion to criminalize politics. Siegelman, a Democrat, was elected Alabama’s governor in 1998 and was defeated in 2002. In 2006, he and a prominent Alabama businessman — Richard Scrushy, former chief executive of HealthSouth — were convicted of bribery.

New Mexico: GOP will appeal state New Mexico Supreme Court redistricting to federal court on Monday | New Mexico Watchdog

Capitol Report New Mexico has learned that Republicans allied with the administration of Gov. Susana Martinez will formally file an appeal in federal court on Monday (Feb. 13) over the New Mexico Supreme Court’s reversal of a House of Representatives redistricting map OK’d back on Jan. 3 by a retired judge the high court itself assigned to tackle the hydra-headed problem of re-apportioning districts for the next 10 years across the state. Democrats embraced the 4-1 ruling by the state Supreme Court to kick the House redistricting decision back to Judge Jim Hall, who adopted a map that was sponsored by attorneys for the Republican governor after hearing from attorneys from the Democratically-controlled legislature as well as a number of other lawyers representing various other political interests in New Mexico.

Voting Blogs: New Citizens United sequel (UPDATED) | SCOTUSblog

The lawyers who pursued the case that led to the Supreme Court’s controversial ruling in 2010 freeing corporations to spend heavily on political campaigns asked the Supreme Court on Friday to overturn a Montana Supreme Court ruling that they argued defies the Court’s decision.   The state court ruling, the new filing argued, is so flatly contradictory to the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission precedent that it should be summarily overturned.

Voting Blogs: Jim Bopp Goes for Broke in Montana Campaign Finance Case, and Just Might Get It | Election Law Blog

Today the James Madison Center filed this application for a stay of the Montana Supreme Court ruling upholding state law barring corporate independent spending in state elections.  As I have explained,the opinion upholds Montana’s ban on independent corporate spending on state elections, and it seems to run headlong into the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in Citizens United.  Eugene Volokh predicts the Court will hear the case and reverse, and Calvin Massey predicts a summary reversal.  (More analysis from SCOTUSBlog.)