Monday round-up
on Sep 16, 2013 at 7:44 am
In an op-ed for POLITICO, Fred Wertheimer warns that if the Court were to strike down the aggregate limits on campaign contributions at issue in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, scheduled for oral argument on October 8, “it would recreate the system of legalized corruption that existed prior to Watergate and might well open the door to striking down all of the remaining contribution limits. This in turn would take us back to the Robber Baron era of the 19th century, when members of Congress were functionally owned and controlled by wealthy interests.”
At Jost on Justice, Kenneth Jost reports on Justice Kennedy’s recent remarks at the annual meeting of the American Bar Association and then uses those remarks as a jumping-off point from which to explain why Kennedy “once again is the justice that lawyers focus on as they fashion their arguments and the justice that court watchers watch as they handicap the term’s cases.”
Relying on the Court’s decision in United States v. Windsor, in which the Court struck down a provision of the federal Defense of Marriage Act that defined “marriage” as a union between a man and a woman, Lambda Legal has asked the Texas National Guard to reconsider a request by the same-sex spouse of a member of the Guard that she be enrolled in the federal system used to process benefits for service members and their families; the Texas National Guard contends that it cannot do so because the state’s constitution bans same-sex marriage. Chris Geidner reports for BuzzFeed.
