Salon.com > U.S. Elections

Court will hear campaign donation limits appeal

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:32:00 +0000

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court will hear a challenge to campaign finance laws limiting how much an individual can give to political campaigns.

The justices on Tuesday decided to hear an appeal from Shaun McCutcheon of Alabama and the Republican National Committee. They are arguing that it's unconstitutional to stop a donor from giving more than $46,200 to political candidates and $70,800 to political committees and PACs.

McCutcheon says he accepts that he can only give $2,500 to a single candidate but says he should be able to give that amount to as many GOP candidates as he wants.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the limits, but the high court decided to review that decision.

The election commission with no commissioners

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 19:00:00 +0000

Despite rampant concerns on both the right and left about the integrity of the election, we seem to have dodged a bullet on Nov. 7, at least on the presidential level. There were no serious problems reported -- no hanging chads, endless recounts or credible evidence of widespread dirty tricks -- and 97 percent of voters said they had no problems voting this year, aside from waiting in lines.

It’s lucky that was the case, because the federal commission tasked with making elections function better has been stymied by partisan infighting that has left it with zero commissioners, with Republicans refusing to appoint new ones and blocking Democrats from doing the same.

Congress created the U.S. Election Assistance Commission with the passage of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which allocated over $3 billion to help states improve their election administration and enacted a number of reforms aimed at preventing another debacle like the presidential election of 2000. The act passed with rare and overwhelming bipartisan support -- the House voted 357-48 in favor and the Senate 92-2 -- but the honeymoon didn’t last long and the commission soon fell victim to the partisan bickering that has hamstrung the Federal Election Commission.

Fox News’ dark night of the soul

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 09:45:00 +0000

By the time we got to the 11 o’clock hour of election night on the East Coast and it all fell apart fast for Mitt Romney and the Republican Party, the atmosphere had turned grumpy and pugnacious on Fox News. No one was in any mood for the grace that the network’s commentators had displayed – no, really! — after Barack Obama’s historic victory four years ago. If Karl Rove’s on-air hissy fit about whether his colleagues had prematurely called Ohio for Obama (they hadn’t) was the undoubted highlight, the generalized sourness and weirdness spread much wider than that.

Carl Cameron, Fox’s top political reporter, generally prides himself on playing it down the middle, at least by the network’s standards. But he couldn’t stop himself from delivering an impassioned stand-up from Romney HQ in Boston that felt like an extended paean to a guy that almost everyone in the country will be delighted never to see or hear anything about again. It was OK and maybe even noble, Cameron insisted, that the Romney team were hunkered down in their hotel suite and unwilling to concede, even after Fox and numerous other news organizations had called the election. Romney had fought so hard for those who believed in him, and wanted every vote to be counted. On Election Day, he had made one final campaign trip to Ohio and Pennsylvania, “on behalf of those who are looking for work.” Cameron did not observe that Romney now belongs to that demographic himself. I know: Oh, snap.

From binders to Benghazi, memes are killing politics

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 16:00:00 +0000

In the overheated, light-speed feedback loop of contemporary media, it’s easy for some irrelevant semiotic or symbolic detail to dominate political discourse for days at a time. If we could go back in time and talk to the journalists covering, say, the 1988 presidential campaign, how would we explain the way that “binders full of women” became a leading search term, Twitter topic and Tumblr inspiration (let alone explain what those things were)?

Then again, it can often seem as if the entire electoral process consists of questions of style and messaging that have nothing to do with one’s ability to govern the country but carry all kinds of perceived psychological and cultural freight. Political culture is full of wisdom and waggery that conveys the message that it’s all a Madison Avenue con, to which only you and I and other savvy observers are immune. Every four years, we choose between Coke and Pepsi; Americans vote for Dad when it comes to the White House and Mom when it comes to Congress. (Actually, in the era of the Tea Party, that has shifted. A whole lot of Americans have voted their crazy racist uncles into Congress, often all too literally.)

Quote of the day

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 22:29:00 +0000

Both presidential candidates have coined silly terms for their opponents. Let the name calling begin:

Yesterday, Obama attacked Romney's tax plan during a campaign stop in Connecticut. "It’s like Robin Hood in reverse — it’s Romney-hood," the president quipped.

Conservatives were not amused, and Romney responded in kind.

“We’ve been watching the president say a lot of things about me and about my policies, and they’re just not right,” Romney told Fox News in our quote of the day. “If I were to coin a term, it would be ‘Obamaloney.’ He’s serving up a dish which is, simply, in contradiction of the truth and it relates to everything from how I’m going to help the middle class to tax policy. He’s just simply saying things that are not accurate.”

Quote of the day

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 23:00:00 +0000

After a gaffe-ridden international trip, Mitt Romney returned to America and tried to explain what had happened to Fox News' Carl Cameron. Excuses and accusations against the media aside, Romney's international trip shed doubt on his diplomatic and political abilities. Perhaps no one expressed those concerns better than Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, when he spoke to the Washington Post:

“He kept tripping over the message,” Alterman said. He then added, “It felt like—for somebody who’s been campaigning for year—he’s still got a learning curve.”

In London, Mitt banks on the wrong horse

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 10:40:00 +0000

So what do you get when you combine Mitt Romney, expensive horseflesh, fancy dinners and a financial scandal in the City of London? An interesting confluence of people and events that once again raises questions about the wealthy Republican candidate’s ability to relate to ordinary Americans and highlights the overwhelming, caustic influence of big money in this year’s presidential race.

Two weeks ago, Mitt Romney told Bob Schieffer on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that he wouldn’t be joining his wife Ann at the London Summer Olympics to watch her champion dressage horse, Rafalca, compete. “I have a campaign to attend to,” Romney said, “so I won’t be able to see it perform, but I’m very pleased for [Ann].”

Speculation has been that Romney’s campaign was wary of their candidate attending an upper class equestrian happening that might only feed ongoing accusations of patrician elitism, accompanied by potentially ruinous photo ops and endless late night jokes, of which there already have been plenty – just ask Stephen Colbert. The New York Times reported: