President Joe Biden will deliver his State of the Union speech on March 1. The Republican Party will have a response. The Working Families Party also plans a response. The WFP speech will be by Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and will be live-streamed on the WFP facebook page. This is the second year in a row the WFP has had a Democratic member of congress deliver the WFP speech.
The Fifth Circuit will hear Longoria v Paxton, 22-50110, on Tuesday, March 8. That is the lawsuit over the Texas law that makes it a criminal offense for an election official to suggest to any voter that he or she apply for a postal ballot. The U.S. District Court had enjoined it.
On January 27, the Rhode Island House State Government Committee voted not to advance HB 6622, a bill to set up a top-two system in Rhode Island. The sponsor is Representative Arthur Corvese (D-North Providence).
On February 22, North Carolina filed this brief in Cawthorn v Circosta, e.d., 5:22cv-50. This is the lawsuit over whether the state has the ability to make a decision on whether congressional candidates should be barred from a ballot because they don’t meet the qualifications listed in the Fourteenth Amendment, section three, concerning insurrection. The hearing is February 28.
The brief says the Socialist Party congressman from Wisconsin, Victor Berger, was unseated by the U.S. House in 1919 for violating the Espionage Act. The state cites this example to show that the amnesty acts passed in the 19th century for ex-Confederates did not eliminate the force of section three of the Fourteenth Amendment.
On February 23, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued an order in Carter v Chapman, 7 MM 2022, setting out a plan for U.S. House district boundaries. The vote is 4-3. The court also ordered that the primary will be held May 17, which is the date that would have been in place if there had been no litigation over redistricting.
The state elections division will now calculate the number of signatures needed in each U.S. House district for independent candidate petitions, and the petitions for the nominees of unqualified parties. Those petitions start to circulate on March 16, and are due August 1. The formula for the number of signatures, set forth in section 2911 of the Election Law, requires a great deal of work by election officials. They must calculate the number of votes received by the winning candidate for U.S. House inside each new district, using election returns from November 2020. This means they must match up the new boundaries with old election returns, requiring a precinct-by-precinct analysis. It would be far easier for the Pennsylvania legislature to require a fixed number of signatures for such petitions for each district, such as, for example, 2,000 signatures.
The calculation will probably show a few districts in which the new requirement is over 5,000 signatures. However, the statewide independent petition is 5,000 signatures. Under the U.S. Supreme Court decisions Illinois State Board of Elections v Socialist Workers Party (1979), and Norman v Reed (1992), it is unconstitutional for any U.S. House petition requirement to be greater than the statewide petition.
