“The Supreme Court’s latest opportunity to restore the First Amendment”

The Supreme Court will be taking up another restriction on the First Amendment in McCutcheon vs. FEC.  Speech regulators limit the amount of support one person can give to people with whom they agree.  From Human Events:

“Shaun McCutcheon is a general contractor in Alabama who runs his own business. He is a conservative who wants to help candidates and organizations who, as his brief says, share his “convictions about the proper role of government and the importance of ensuring that elected officials adhere to constitutional limitations on their authority.” During the 2011-2012 election cycle, he contributed $33,088 to congressional races, including the symbolic amount of $1,776 to each of 15 challengers trying to unseat incumbents, well below the maximum he could have contributed individually to each candidate. . . .

It is completely unreasonable to claim that it is legitimate for McCutcheon to make contributions of $2,600 to 18 candidates, but if he contributes that amount to 19 candidates, we are suddenly in danger of encouraging corruption.”

“Montana’s Northern Cheyenne tribe fighting to secure voting rights”

“He has barely voted over the past 40 years, not because he hasn’t wanted to but because it has been 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 gauntlet of racism and hostility that, they say, can often land them in jail on charges of drunkenness and public disorder.”

Andrew Gumbel at the Guardian.

Curious why he can’t registered to vote by mail or print an online application.  Here is the tribe’s application for an absentee ballot.  It seems odd that someone would make the trip drunk and show up to register to vote. Did Gumbel look at any of the charges?  Did he get names of those charged, or did he accept this assertion at face value?  Andrew Gumbel left a lot of open questions on the sideline.  Any thoughts welcome.

WSJ: “Eric Holder’s 2014 Racial Politics”

Embarrassing overreach in the North Carolina complaint:

“For Eric Holder, American racial history is frozen in the 1960s. The Supreme Court ruled in June that a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is no longer justified due to racial progress, but the U.S. Attorney General has launched a campaign to undo the decision state-by-state. His latest target is North Carolina, which he seems to think is run from the grave by the early version of George Wallace.”

Salter at Clarion Ledger: Holder Profiles the South

“That legal strategy is based on attacking states or jurisdictions for their history. In other words, Holder proposes to treat Southern states based on their supposed “profile” rather than their political realities.

Trying to institutionalize Section 5’s inherent mistrust of voters and governments in the South to protect voting rights and hold fair elections is nothing short of racial and political profiling. It engenders the same two-way-street mistrust as does individual racial profiling.

It also politicizes Section 5 to the point that it becomes nothing more or less than a partisan political issue that has nothing whatsoever to do with voting rights, but rather about the outcome of elections and partisan advantage. The undeniable interjection of partisan advantage into enforcement of the Voting Right Act is what led the court’s decision to begin to dismantle it in the first place.”

Jackson Clarion Ledger.