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By Laura MacCleery – 05/20/08
Cross-posted from the Huffington Post.
Late Friday, a letter sent from Federal Election Commission (FEC) nominee Hans von Spakovsky to the White House officially withdrawing his name from consideration was made public. This is undoubtedly good news as the election season kicks into high gear, and will help to assure that the FEC will be restored to its previous, albeit minimal, functionality.
Von Spakovsky's nomination was opposed by civil rights and good government groups due to his frightening record of partisan witch-hunts and voter suppression while in the Voting Division at the Justice Department. Democrats had been insisting on an up-or-down vote for each of the nominees, including von Spakovsky, a former Bush campaign staffer and GOP operative.
Von Spakovsky was the antithesis of the kind of person needed at the Commission, which is charged with the fair and non-partisan administration of campaign finance law. The FEC has been unable to make decisions at the commission level for months, as the triangular nomination standoff between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the White House continued. While the White House had indicated that an up-or-down vote was acceptable, McConnell, who is no friend of the FEC, appeared to be holding firm in insisting on a vote on the full slate of candidates.
As Sen. Reid wrote in a letter to the White House Monday, the two options were to convince Republicans to allow the vote or ask von Spakovsky to withdraw. Knowing McConnell, it's no surprise that the second option was more easily accomplished.
A statement from Sen. Reid indicated that von Spakovsky's "withdrawal today is a victory for our electoral process. With Mr. von Spakovsky now removed, I anticipate that we will be able to swiftly put a functioning FEC in place. That too is what the American people deserve."
There's something for everybody in the deal. A functioning FEC should help to clarify the legal consequences of Sen. John McCain's decision to reject public funds for the presidential primary, following his reliance on public funding as collateral for a loan in the earlier days of the race. It will also ensure that money from the system is available for McCain in the general election, a fact surely not lost on the White House.
Some are speculating that even with the latest turn of events, the White House will continue to resist re-nominating Commissioner David Mason, who has publicly questioned the public funding reversal of Sen.McCain's presidential campaign. The apparent political motivation behind White House's aversion to Mason has been decried by many in the reform community, including those who have disagreed with many of Mason's decisions.
There is a committee hearing in the Senate scheduled for May 21st to consider President Bush's latest slate of FEC nominees. And while the country needs an FEC in this election year that will be able to do its job, the committee should take a close look in particular at GOP operative Don McGahn, whoa New York Times editorial called a "Republican warhorse. "McGahn was in charge of ethics for the ethically dubious former House majority leader Rep. Tom Delay (R.-TX), and served as a high-ranking party official. He is a particularly partisan choice in an election year certain to be filled with highly charged enforcement decisions.
According to the Congressional Quarterly, McGahn was General Counsel to the National Republican Congressional Committee in October 2002, when the NRCC initiated a scheme to circumvent a new law banning soft money in federal elections, mere weeks prior to when the law would take effect. The plan involved a transfer of $1 million in soft money from the NRCC to the Leadership Forum, a surrogate group set up by House Republican leaders to spend soft money on the 2004 House races in violation of the new law. The $1 million was returned after the plan became public.
Despite its eagerness to seal the deal quickly, the Senate should fully investigate whether McGahn is an appropriate choice for an enforcement agency.
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Voting Rights & Elections, EAC & DOJ Oversight
By Judith Joffe-Block – 05/20/08
*Cross-posted from ReformNY
Expanding
access to higher education in prisons and for those leaving prison.
Extending voting rights to people on parole. Limiting the imposition of
fees and fines on those leaving prison.
These are a few of the
proposals that reentry advocates will raise with the state legislature
today at the
2nd annual Advocacy Day in Albany.
The New York Reentry Roundtable has created a
comprehensive agenda
for reform that identifies reentry legislation the Roundtable is
supporting on matters relating to employment, housing, family
reunification, higher education, healthcare, financial debt, political
participation, and sentencing reform.
As we’ve mentioned in
past posts on ReformNY,
New York’s laws that disenfranchise people on parole are not only
unfair, but lead to confusion about who is eligible to vote, even among
county Board of Election officials. This confusion further contributes
to the de facto disenfranchisement of thousands of eligible voters and
dilutes the voting power of the state’s communities of color.
Read the rest of this story ...
Tags: Voting After Criminal Conviction, State-Based Advocacy
By Justin Levitt – 05/19/08
The Supreme Court's recent
Crawford decision on Indiana's photo ID law was a statement on
evidence (albeit mixed in its
devotion to facts), and not a call to arms. And so far, few states have gotten riled up, preferring instead to spend their little remaining legislative time this session on real solutions to real problems, rather than disenfranchising
elderly nuns.
Political operatives in two states, though, decided that this was an opportune moment to try to tilt the electoral scales for 2008, and pressed legislation creating—not solving—problems for their own citizens.
We've written before on Missouri's firestorm over a proposed constitutional amendment on restrictive photo ID and citizenship rules. At the end of the legislative session, and with the potential to swing the 2008 election on the line (given the history of photo-finish statewide races in Missouri), the amendment died on the vine last Friday after lawmakers ajourned for the year without bringing it to a vote. And then there's the neighbor to the west, which was trying mightily to keep up with the Joneses.
Read the rest of this story ...
Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter ID, Voter Registration Drives
By Eric Lane – 05/19/08
News that Governor David Paterson has authorized Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to conduct a full-blown investigation into "political interference" by the New York State police is welcomed. Nothing can be more damaging to our democratic political system nor to our law enforcement agencies than harnessing them to influence political outcomes. Think Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and the FBI. Think Richard Nixon, Watergate, and the FBI. Cuomo hits the constitutional nail on the head when he observes that "combining politics and police work is a toxic brew." This toxic brew, in fact, is the drink of authoritarian regimes intent on protecting their own power, rather than the democratic political system they swear to defend.
But police interference in politics is not new to New York State. Just over thirty years ago I served as Counsel to the New York State Assembly Task Force on State Police Non-Criminal Files. The task force was established after a newly appointed State Police Superintendent, William Connelie, reported in 1975 that the state police had collected and maintained information on a broad array of what they characterized as "non criminal" individuals and groups. In fact, according to the Task Force Report, these files numbered in the hundreds of thousand. And within in them were well over 600,000 entries. Most of the files dealing with groups or organizations consisted of reports on "meetings, demonstration or planned activities." But the focus often was on ideas. According to the Report, "the Police appeared concerned with any individual or group which was likely to speak publicly...and espouse ideas which challenged the status quo." Ideas seemed to be seen as a precursor to criminal conduct—a "thought crime" if you will—and their proponents as potential criminals. Many individual files also contained personal information such as records of credit checks, and of conversations with employers, neighbors, professors, local government officials and bank officers.
Read the rest of this story ...
Tags: Justice, NY Reform, Checks & Balances, Privacy & Profiling
By Thaddeus Kromelis – 05/16/08
It appears supporters of impartial courts are learning their ranks may be larger than expected.
On the heels of this week's ousting of Justice Maynard from West Virginia's high court, news appeared in the Charleston Gazette that the multi-million-dollar mining lawsuit which landed the jet-setting judge on the wrong side of Mountain State voters (deftly unpacked here by Maggie Barron) could be heading before the U.S. Supreme Court if one of the litigants gets its way.
Yesterday, it came to light that Theodore Olson, former Solicitor General and the man who successfully represented President Bush in Bush v. Gore, is representing Harman Mining Co. in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their appeal.
Read the rest of this story ...
Tags: Democracy, Fair Courts
By Maggie Barron – 05/15/08
It takes a lot for a sitting Supreme Court justice to lose
an election, but Elliot Maynard managed. On Tuesday, as the
New York Times reports, the chief
justice of West Virginia's
Supreme Court lost his re-election bid, though he began as the clear favorite
and despite the fact that he had raised the most money.
The trouble for Maynard's campaign started back in January, when
photos surfaced of the Chief Justice (on the left), in 2006, enjoying a vacation on the
French Riviera with none other than Don Blankenship, the chief executive of one
of West Virginia's
largest mining companies. A harmless, jet-setting friendship? Well, Blankenship
happened to have a multi-million dollar
case pending before Maynard's court at the time. A few months later, Maynard
voted with the majority in the 3-2 decision to overturn a $50 million judgment
against Blankenship's company.
Read the rest of this story ...
Tags: Fair Courts, Independence & Accountability, State Judicial Elections
By Bethany Foster & Andrew Stengel – 05/14/08
Cross-posted from Daily News editorial
Two weeks ago, state Sen. Frank Padavan received extra credit—quite inappropriately—from Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein when a cluster of public schools in Bellerose, Queens, was renamed for him. Padavan was apparently instrumental in converting a state-owned psychiatric facility into the three public schools, which now make up what is called the Frank Padavan Campus.
Rather than letting this little favor slide by—as so many of these embellishments do—it's time for the senator and those who bestowed the honor to learn a tough ethics lesson.
The state's Public Officers Law is clear on this: Elected officials cannot receive extra compensation or any gift of more than nominal value. Placing someone's name in a prominent place, whether it's an actual building or a tract of land, has monetary value. That's why many ballfields around the country are known by corporate names, like FedEx or Petco. Citibank will reportedly pay $20 million per year to call the new Mets stadium Citi Field....
Read entire editorial here.
Tags: Democracy, NY Reform
By Thaddeus Kromelis – 05/12/08
The Show Me State – today lawmakers in Missouri are expected to vote on a constitutional amendment that would require voters to provide proof of citizenship—birth certificates and passports, leave the utility bill at home—when registering to vote. Supporters claim erecting this barrier will prevent illegal immigrants from casting votes and keep the polls free of voter fraud.
According to the New York Times, the Missouri law is expected to pass and would yolk voters with a burden greater than the Indiana's voter ID law recently upheld by the Supreme Court. Also, of 19 states considering similar requirements, Missouri is the only one that could very well have something on the books in time for the presidential election.
Read the rest of this story ...
Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Voter ID
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