Showing posts with label David Savage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Savage. Show all posts

Sunday, September 22, 2013

"It would be terrible for our democracy … if one politician could directly solicit $3.6 million from a single donor."

"That is 70 times the median income for an American family. It would mean a tiny, tiny group of donors would wield unprecedented power and influence," says an election law expert from a liberal advocacy group, quoted by David Savage in an L.A. Times piece titled "Supreme Court may strike new blow to campaign funding laws/The Supreme Court, in a new campaign funding case, may lift a lid on the total the wealthy can give to all candidates and parties."
In recent [Supreme Court] opinions, [Chief Justice John] Roberts has said the government may not try to "level the playing field" between candidates or prevent well-funded candidates from using their financial advantage to dominate the airwaves. The only justification for limiting contributions, the court has said, is to prevent "corruption or the appearance of corruption."...

"This is a limit on how many candidates you support, not on how much you give them," said James Bopp Jr., an attorney for the Republican National Committee. He cites the case of McCutcheon, an Alabama man who gave a total of $33,000 to various Republican candidates for Congress last year and wanted to give $21,000 more. He was stopped by the legal limit on total contributions to candidates, which now stands at $48,600.

McCutcheon "holds firm convictions on the proper role of government" and "opposes numerous and ill-conceived and overreaching laws," he told the court, and he wants more "federal officeholders who share his beliefs."

Sunday, December 9, 2012

"Justice Antonin Scalia believes the law can and should enforce moral standards," says David Savage, incorrectly.

In the L.A. Times. Why is it so hard to read Scalia's Lawrence v. Texas dissent? Experts — purported experts — like Savage, insist on seeing something that Scalia directly tells us he is not saying. He says laws may rest on morality, not that they should:
Let me be clear that I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means. Social perceptions of sexual and other morality change over time, and every group has the right to persuade its fellow citizens that its view of such matters is the best.... I would no more require a State to criminalize homosexual acts – or, for that matter, display any moral disapprobation of them – than I would forbid it to do so....
And by the way, Scalia has already committed to the proposition that Lawrence dictates the end of the exclusion of gay couples from legal marriage:
If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is “no legitimate state interest” for purposes of proscribing that conduct, and if, as the Court coos (casting aside all pretense of neutrality), “[w]hen sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring,” what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising “[t]he liberty protected by the Constitution”? Surely not the encouragement of procreation, since the sterile and the elderly are allowed to marry. 
The majority had claimed that Lawrence did not "involve” the issue of gay marriage, and Scalia said that could only make sense if you think "principle and logic have nothing to do with the decisions of this Court." (Of course, Scalia dissented in Lawrence and may decline to adhere to it, but it won't be because he thinks laws should enforce morality. It will be because he thinks courts should not strike down laws simply because there is no support for them other than morality.)

ADDED: Another post about Scalia, law, and morality, and I rather laboriously spell out some legal distinctions in the comments, here.