Common Cause delivered more than 32,000 petitions to the Department of Justice on March 22 calling for a Justice Department investigation of US Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. We want to know whether Scalia and Thomas should have recused themselves from the Citizens United case because of their participation in secret political strategy meetings with Koch Industries.
"Common Cause volunteers helped deliver petitions with over 30,000 signatures to the Justice Department today, asking them to investigate US Supreme Court Justices Scalia' and Thomas' ties to Koch Industries. It was a beautiful day to stand outside the Department of Justice ... We were not allowed into the building."
Has this country regressed democratically to the point that common citizens with signed petitions can't enter a non-security related federal building??
Remember, "voting turnout and activism means spreading the word!"
"Today, the Supreme Court is hearing hear oral arguments in Fox v. Vice, a case that threatens to choke off future civil rights litigation. People For the American Way Foundation has joined an amicus brief protecting the right of people to sue to protect their basic rights.
In a federal civil rights lawsuit, where the government or a government official is being sued, a trial court can sometimes order the plaintiff to pay the defendant's legal fees. The law allows this if (1) the defendant is the prevailing party and (2) the plaintiff's case was frivolous. In Fox v. Vice, the Supreme Court is being asked to interpret this law. The potential exposure to paying a defendant's legal fees serves as an obvious deterrent to bringing suit, and it's important, therefore that it be narrowly construed in order not to violate Congress's intent to empower people to vindicate their rights in the courts."
An American's civil rights is an integral part of our US Constitution's Bill of Rights, and many people have fought hard to improve voting rights across the country. A court verdict mandating a plaintiff that loses a case to pay all of the winning defendant's legal fees, whether that case is deemed frivolous or not, would be a major obstacle or deterrent to many future civil rights cases.
Remember, "voting turnout and activism means spreading the word!"
New York – Today, in a major victory for the rule of law, the Supreme Court issued a decision in the landmark case of Caperton v. Massey, reversing the decision of the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals by a 5 to 4 vote.
"There has been an unprecedented flood of money into judicial elections in the states," said Susan Liss, Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. "And this decision makes clear that campaign contributions must not be permitted to undermine the impartiality of the courts."
"This is a major victory for the rule of law," stated James Sample, Counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice. "The Supreme Court has reaffirmed the fundamental principle that money should not influence the courts, and that justice should not be for sale."
This landmark case brought together an unlikely set of allies who supported Caperton in his bid for an impartial tribunal. The strange bedfellows included former state Supreme Court justices, corporations like Wal-Mart and Lockheed Martin, and advocates for fair courts like the Brennan Center for Justice and the Campaign Legal Center.
"The remarkable coalition supporting Caperton's position speaks to the considerable effect the outcome will have on our judicial system—and the widely recognized need to ensure that the courts continue to dispense fair and impartial justice," Liss observed.
In Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co., the Supreme Court grappled with the question whether the fundamental right to a fair hearing before a neutral arbiter required disqualification of a judge in a case where one party to litigation had given extraordinary campaign contributions to the judge while the party's case was pending. Against a backdrop of a dramatic rise of special interest spending in judicial elections nationwide, former Solicitor General Theodore Olson argued before the Supreme Court on March 3 that the Constitution's due-process clause required a West Virginia Judge to recuse himself from a lawsuit involving an executive who spent $3 million to elect the judge. Those expenditures, which came at the same time the court was considering the executive's case, were more than all other contributions to the judge's election, combined.
Emphasizing that a "fair trial in a fair tribunal is a basic requirement of due process," the Supreme Court ruled that the constitution required recusal under the circumstances of the case. Justice Kennedy delivered the opinion of the Court, and was joined by Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer. Chief Judge Roberts issued a dissenting opinion that was joined by Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito, and Justice Scalia also filed a dissenting opinion.
Background materials on the case, including all the amicus briefs filed, can be found here. The Brennan Center's amicus brief can be found here.
For more information or to set up an interview with James Sample, please contact Jeanine Plant-Chirlin at 212-998-6289 or jeanine.plant-chirlin@nyu.edu, Susan Lehman at 212-998-6318 or susan.lehman@nyu.edu. You can also contact James Sample directly at 406- 690-3947.
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Posted May 7, 2009 by Tara Malloy and J. Gerald Hebert
Many decades of hard-earned reforms to the nation’s campaign finance laws are in danger of being dismantled by a litigation offensive mounted by interests opposed to those reforms.
Emboldened by the conservative majority in the U.S. Supreme Court, ideological and interest group opponents of campaign finance regulation have brought an unprecedented number of cases in the past year to challenge campaign finance laws at the federal, state and municipal levels. The challenges are being brought by national party committees, trade associations, ideological groups and so-called “527” organizations. These opponents are often represented by attorneys working for tax-exempt organizations whose public filings reveal little about their funding sources and whose primary mission is to overturn existing campaign finance laws.
What is most striking about these groups’ litigation effort is that it challenges longstanding campaign finance laws that have already been upheld and declared constitutional. For this reason, their challenges often fail in the lower courts as these courts simply uphold preexisting Supreme Court precedent that is supportive of campaign finance regulation. The problem is that under Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court is quickly undermining that very precedent.
The Roberts Court, however, is not overturning earlier Supreme Court rulings openly. In their current offensive, anti-reform groups rarely challenge the general constitutionality of campaign finance law “on its face,” but instead frame their cases as challenges to the law “as applied” to specific situations. These kind of “as applied” challenges have given the Roberts Court the opportunity to significantly erode existing precedent without having to reverse such precedent explicitly. Effectively, however, the Roberts Court has begun to overturn a variety of campaign laws previously upheld by the High Court.
At the federal level, recent challenges are attempting to tear down many decades’ worth of election law, including the principles behind restrictions on corporations that extend as far back as the Tillman Act of 1907. That Act banned political contributions by corporations and was shepherded through Congress by President Teddy Roosevelt in an era when corporations wielded staggering power in Washington as the main sources of funding for political parties. Challenges to other long-standing provisions of the election laws, such as coordinated party spending limits, demonstrate that the mission of anti-reform advocates is far more ambitious than merely rolling back the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), also known as McCain-Feingold. Instead, their apparent goal is to go back nearly a century and dismantle many of the campaign finance reforms enacted in the wake of the Watergate era scandals and to revert to an era of unregulated, undisclosed spending in federal elections that fueled public outrage at the turn of the 20th Century.
This federal litigation offensive is being replicated at the state level. During the past two years, opponents of campaign finance regulation have challenged state or municipal campaign finance laws in Arizona, California, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Utah, Washington and West Virginia, to name just a few jurisdictions.
As a result of this redoubled anti-reform effort, the campaign finance arena has experienced one of its most active litigation periods. In the past year, the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan Washington-based legal institute with particular expertise in issues of campaign finance law, lobbying regulation and government ethics, has represented a party or was active as an amicus in over twenty cases in both federal and state court, and monitored and consulted in several additional cases.
The litigation efforts against decades’ worth of campaign finance laws are concentrated in five principal subject matter areas:
I. Attacking Limits on Use of Corporate and Union Treasury Funds II. Going After the “Soft Money” Ban and Coordinated Spending Limits III. Challenging Public Financing Programs IV. Attempting to Deregulate “527 Group” Spending V. Undermining Meaningful Political Disclosure
[...]
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Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner. Image via WikipediaGovernment reform orgs. deliver news on major events within their areas of expertise. From: TPM Muckraker [Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner acts quickly and beats Friday deadline on state voter registration rules. -David Weller]
The justices on Friday overruled a federal appeals court that had ordered Ohio's top elections official to do more to help counties verify voter eligibility.
Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, faced a deadline of Friday to set up a system to provide local officials with names of newly registered voters whose driver's license numbers or Social Security numbers on voter registration forms don't match records in other government databases.
The ruling could make it easier to vote for thousands of Ohioans whose voter registration information did not match up with other government records.
And the McCain campaign has already responded. On a conference call with reporters just now, campaign manager Rick Davis said: "If you look at what the ruling said, it said that the Republican party didn't have standing in order to bring the suit, it didn't make a decision on the merits of the case." Davis added: "I think that the Secretary of State ought to do her job."
[TPM Muckraker article accepts comments]
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