An opinion piece in the Courier Express supports photo ID in Pennsylvania:
The Legislature has as much right to require voters to present
government-issued photo identification before being allowed to vote as
it does requiring voters to put their signatures onto a piece of paper
in the polling place before getting a ballot.
Jeffrey Toobin has posted an article entitled “Another Citizens United, But Worse” with his views and fears on the McCutcheon case that involved a Republican (gasp*!) named Shaun McCutcheon who had the audacity to want to contribute more than the statutory maximum. Toobin also criticizes the legally “strange” rulings from the Supreme Court that actually require “quid pro quo” showings of corruption instead of the appearance of corruption for First Amendment regulation. The bottom line: The left fears another defeat in the regulatory construct developed over decades.
Think the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United was bad? A worse one may be on the horizon.…As Justice Kennedy wrote, the fact that contributors “may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt.” Indeed, he observed further, “political speech cannot be limited based on a speaker’s wealth.”Citizens United was not an aberration for this Court. It emerged from a definite view about the intersection of campaigns and free speech. The Justices in the majority are engaging in a long-term project to deregulate campaigns. A blessing on unlimited aggregate contributions is the next logical step for them to take—and they have five votes.
Fox News Video here.
We agree with Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who said, “The Obama administration’s attempt to assert control of Texas elections is an affront to the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision and hostile to the Constitution. On voter ID and redistricting, the Supreme Court has ruled in Texas’ favor, and we will continue to seek protection from the land’s highest court from overreaching federal government’s action.”
A federal judge strikes down the lawsuit challenging the legality and constitutionality of the Harris County redistricting plan.
In a ruling filed Thursday, U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore said the lawyers for local Hispanic activists, who argued that the map illegally diluted Latino votes in the only Latino-opportunity county commissioner precinct, failed to prove the redistricting plan was unconstitutional or that race was the predominant factor in the design of the plan.
Our ruling: The Lone Star Project said Abbott “converted over $1 million in federal grant money intended for use to prosecute online sexual predators and other cyber crimes and instead used it to harass and prosecute senior citizens who were assisting other senior citizens in applying for mail-in ballots.”Actually, less than $100,000 of a grant—less than one-fifteenth of it–was spent investigating alleged violations of election law. The grant aid also wasn’t restricted, or necessarily intended for, other purposes. So there was no conversion.Senior citizens were pursued, bur our sense is it’s an eye-of-the-beholder question whether the investigations were harassment.We rate this claim as False.
After the recent departure of former Secretary of State Beth Chapman, a new Secretary of State is sworn into the position in Alabama. However, the new Secretary is Jim Bennett, not a newcomer to the position.
In a ceremony today with Governor Robert Bentley, Jim Bennett was sworn in as Alabama’s 52nd Secretary of State. Bennett, who previously held the post from 1993 to 2003, was already the longest continuously serving Secretaries of State in recent history and is among the longest serving secretaries of state in Alabama history.
Bob Filner, the pervert progressive mayor of San Diego, (“let me stick my tongue down your throat; please don’t wear underwear to the office.”) is also another California speech regulator. Filner supports forced government speech through government funding of political campaigns, and a variety of other familiar free speech regulations.
“the suit seems to be more promotion and harassment than an attempt to change the law. Would the plaintiffs prefer a public campaign financing program in San Diego?”
The comments demonstrate the arrogance of many in the speech regulation universe, so convinced of the rightness of their position, they don’t take anyone seriously who disagrees with them. They must certainly be right. They must certainly be better qualified to decide who may talk and who may not. They don’t appreciate disagreement with efforts to regulate speech. Diversity of opinion, to them, consists of people with different last names offering the same opinion. Efforts to fund a vibrant debate are met with threats of criminal prosecution.
That’s what thugs throughout history have done – devise ways to threaten people with whom they disagree by crafting laws facially benign but ultimately malignant. People like Filner oppose freedom and individual liberty and concoct schemes to take away that freedom of speech and sell it as something desirable.
They fear vibrant debate more than they fear the government, despite the lessons of history.
We’ve seen perverts like Filner before, and we’ll see it again. We’ve seen attacks of freedom before, like San Diego’s, and given the well funded and overly-respected activity of the speech regulators, we are sure to see continued efforts to move power away from the people to the government.
The Arizona Capitol Times reports:
Following the guidance of a U.S. Supreme
Court justice, Attorney General Tom Horne has threatened to sue an
effectively non-existent federal commission if it doesn’t put Arizona’s
requirement of proof-of-citizenship on federal voter registration forms. Horne
is giving the U.S. Election Assistance Commission until Aug. 19 to act,
stating in a July 26 letter to the commission’s acting executive
director, Alice Miller, that Louisiana recently got approval to put
requirements specific to the state on the federal forms.
The Supreme Court may have provided Arizona a path to place the state instructions on the federal form by referencing the state request as an alternative means or exercise of enforcing a state’s constitutional power to determine voting qualifications.
The NVRA permits a State to request the EAC to include state specific instructions on the Federal Form, see 42 U. S. C. §1973gg–7(a)(2), and a State may challenge the EAC’s rejection of that request (or failure to act on it) in a suit under the Administrative Procedure Act. That alternative means of enforcing its constitutional power to determine voting qualifications remains open to Arizona here. Should the EAC reject or decline to act on a renewed request, Arizona would have the opportunity to establish in a reviewing court that a mere oath will not suffice to effectuate its citizenship requirement and that the EAC is therefore under a nondiscretionary duty to include Arizona’s concrete-evidence requirement on the Federal Form. Pp. 13–17and here:
Arizona might also assert (as it has argued here) that it would be arbitrary for the EAC to refuse to include Arizona’s instruction when it has accepted a similar instruction requested by Louisiana.
