|
Apr 14, 2006 -- Legal Center Weekly Report: April 14, 2006
In a letter sent Thursday, April 13, 2006, to House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) and House Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier (R-CA), the Legal Center along with Common Cause, Democracy 21, League of Women Voters, Public Citizen and U.S. PIRG expressed strong opposition to H.R. 4975, the lobbying legislation proposed by the House Republican leadership, which is headed for the House floor when Congress returns from its Easter recess.
The reform groups said they would support efforts to defeat any rule to bring H.R. 4975 to the House floor, if the rule prohibits Members from voting on key amendments to strengthen the legislation. The groups also said in the letter that they would work to defeat H.R 4975 if it "is not strengthened through successful floor amendments to effectively address the lobbying, ethics and corruption issues in Congress."
Click here to read the letter.
On April 10, 2006, a hearing was held before the three-judge court in WRTL v. FEC—an as-applied constitutional challenge to the electioneering communications of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA). This case is on remand to the three-judge court from the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled in January that such as-applied challenges were not foreclosed by the Court's decision in McConnell v. FEC, which upheld nearly all of the provisions of BCRA.
At the hearing, both the FEC and the intervenors (Senator John McCain, and Representatives Tammy Baldwin, Marty Meehan, and Chris Shays) urged the three-judge court to permit a limited time for discovery. The plaintiff, WRTL, opposed any discovery in the case and urged the Court to simply rule on the case by ruling on motions for summary judgment. At the conclusion of the hearing, the court took the matter under advisement. CLC serves as co-counsel for the congressional intervenors.
On April 12, 2006 , CLC Executive Director Gerry Hebert spoke to a law school class at the Washington College of Law at American University in Washington , DC . The subject matters for the class were: the Voting Rights Act, redistricting reform, including a discussion of the pending Supreme Court case involving the Texas congressional re-redistricting plan, and the reauthorization of the special provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
Week in the News
To read a variety of this week's editorials and articles on campaign finance, please click here. |
