Election Law

Part Two in a Two-Part Series on What Should Happen to Same-Sex Marriage in California After Hollingsworth v. Perry.

It was completely understandable, justifiable and even predictable that the Supreme Court would dispose of the challenge to California's voter-enacted ban on same-sex marriage, Proposition 8, by saying that the sponsors/proponents of the measure lacked legal "standing" to defend it in federal court, even when the State Governor and Attorney General failed to defend.  Given the rapidly changing legal landscape, any principled legal way to bypass until another day the big question of whether there is a national right to same-sex marriage was worth exploring, as I have argued,

Now that the 2012 election is in the rear-view mirror and the 2016 election is still somewhat distant on the horizon, this is an appropriate time to return to the question of presidential election reform.  As I have written about many times (including here) on this and other websites, and in academic journals, one important and prominent reform effort, known as the National Popular Vote (NPV) Compact, seeks to move the country

During oral argument last week in Shelby County v. Holder, the constitutional challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice Roberts asked, “[I]s it the government’s submission that the citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North?” Solicitor General Verrilli responded, “It is not, and I do not know the answer to that . . . .”

Tomorrow, the Court will hear argument in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, which raises the question of the continuing validity of the preclearance requirement of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Amid all the drama surrounding the fiscal cliff negotiations of the last few weeks, there was an important, sad, and in some respects troubling development in the U.S. Senate.  Hawaii Democratic Senator Daniel K. Inouye passed away, and Hawaii Democratic Governor Neil Abercrombie appointed Democrat Brian Schatz to replace him.  Schatz was sworn in, and will serve in the Senate until Nov. 2014, when an election will be held to fill the remainder of Inouye’s six-year term, which expires in January 2017.

With the Obama-Romney election nearly upon us, my column today updates readers on the status of various presidential election reform efforts (a topic about which I have written columns for this site in the past).

Enacted in 1965 and reauthorized several times since, the Voting Rights Act (VRA) has long been regarded as the capstone of our nation's civil rights architecture.

The national Democratic and Republican parties are today both highly polarized and evenly matched. Elections have become pitched battles for control of government, and the candidates who lead the charge for each party have dramatically different ideas about what the government should do. Under these conditions, small turnout swings within each party's base can have very large consequences for the course of public policy.

The role of money in federal elections has never been more prominent than in this, the 2012 presidential, cycle.  It is thus quite natural that commentators these days would lavish attention on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 blockbuster Supreme Court ruling saying that corporations and unions, just like individual persons, are entitled under the First Amendment to expend money to independently advocate in favor of or against candidates for elective office.