Thursday round-up
on Oct 10, 2013 at 10:18 am
Tuesday’s oral argument in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, in which the Court is considering the constitutionality of aggregate limits on campaign contributions, continues to draw commentary. Bill Moyers discusses the case with law professor Heather Gerken on Moyers & Company, while in an op-ed for The Washington Examiner, David Keating argues that the Court “evaluates most anti-speech laws with great skepticism, yet campaign finance restrictions get a free pass. In order for the First Amendment to protect our rights to free speech, the court must take a much more skeptical view of the campaign finance laws that benefit the politicians who voted them into law.” At ACSblog, Adam Lioz takes a different view, contending that “any move to strike a federal contribution limit for the first time ever would be a big step backwards for both politics and law. Enabling elite donors to “max out” to an unlimited number of candidates wouldn’t just encourage circumvention of remaining limits; it would also make a narrower set of wealthier donors into political kingmakers – acting as gatekeepers deciding who can run effective campaigns.”
Commentary on Justice Scalia’s interview with New York magazine (which I covered in Monday’s round-up) also continues. In The Atlantic, Andrew Cohen discusses the Justice’s comparison of himself with Justice George Sutherland, whom Cohen describes as “the late, great conservative jurist best known for obstructing the New Deal.” Cohen suggests that Scalia “wants history to remember him as the ‘intellectual architect’ of the modern fight against progressivism” and describes himself as “genuinely surprised that Justice Scalia is bracing himself for the possibility that his side in the fight won’t be” winning, and therefore writing, the history of this era.
Finally, the Court heard oral arguments yesterday in United States v. Woods, a challenge to the IRS’s interpretation of a provision of the Tax Code, and Atlantic Marine Construction v. U.S. District Court, in which the Court is considering issues relating to forum selection. Jaclyn Belczyk reports briefly on both cases for JURIST.
