Tuesday round-up
on Oct 1, 2013 at 6:33 am
Today the Court will issue orders from yesterday’s Conference – the so-called “Long Conference,” at which the Justices considered the cert. petitions that had accumulated since their summer recess began in late June. But press coverage of the Court continues to focus on next week’s oral arguments, and in particular the argument in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, in which the Court will consider the constitutionality of aggregate limits on campaign contributions. Rick Hasen previews the case for Slate, framing the real question as “what Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito will do. Neither has voted to uphold a campaign finance limit in the five campaign finance cases that each has heard. Yet they have shown some restraint along the way.” In The Huffington Post, Paul Blumenthal reports on recent remarks by Senator Elizabeth Warren, who warned that the case presents “a ‘clear danger’ that threatens to expand the influence of large and wealthy corporations on elections.” And Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21 released a series of articles on the case, including one in which he predicted that a decision in favor of the plaintiffs in the case would “return to our elections huge contributions that directly support candidates and parties and will recreate the system of legalized bribery that existed prior to . . . Watergate.”
