The Independent Green Party, which exists only in Virginia and which is not associated with the Green Party, has already begun circulating a petition in Virginia for President. It lists Michael Bloomberg for President and Larry Ellison for Vice-President. In case those individuals choose not to run, Virginia law lets the Independent Green Party, or any petitioning group, substitute different names later. Thanks to Carey Campbell for this news.
Many commentators believe that Article Two of the U.S. Constitution, which says the U.S. House chooses the President when no one gets a majority of the electoral college vote, injures independent presidential candidates, or the presidential nominees of new parties. But Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., a member of the Wall Street editorial board and a columnist for that newspaper, writes here that the provision would actually help Michael Bloomberg if he ran for president this year as an independent.
This article at The Moderate Voice discusses Jenkins’ column and quotes extensively from it.
Scotusblog has this explanation about what happens to U.S. Supreme Court decisions that haven’t been issued yet, but in which the initial vote after the oral argument resulted in a tentative 5-4 decision, in which Justice Antonin Scalia was in the majority. As the article explains, such tentative votes don’t count, and there may be many 4-4 decisions. On a U.S. Supreme Court tie, the ruling of the lower court stands.
This article explains the consequences for several high-profile cases.
For election law, the first impact of Scalia’s death may be in Harris v McCrory, 15A809, the North Carolina gerrymandering case. The Court was expected to decide very soon whether or not to stay the lower court ruling. With no stay, the North Carolina U.S. House districts will be redrawn soon. And with new districts in place, the state will almost certainly then provide for a primary at some time other than the scheduled March 15 primary. That special, later primary would be just for U.S. House.
On February 12, the Socialist Workers Party announced that its 2016 national ticket will be Alyson Kennedy for president, and Osborne Hart for vice-president. This is only the second time that the SWP has nominated a woman for President; the first time was in 1972, when Linda Jenness ran.
The Socialist Workers Party has now nominated a presidential candidate for 18 elections in a row. Besides the Democratic and Republican Parties, the only other U.S. political parties that ever did that were the Prohibition and Socialist Labor Parties.
The 2016 campaign now has four parties with “Socialist”, “Socialism”, or “Workers” in their name with presidential nominees. The others are the Socialist Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the Workers World Party. All of them except the Socialist Party have roots in the Trotskyist movement. Thanks to Jed Ziggler for the news.
Even though February 15 is a holiday, North Carolina legislators will start working on new U.S. House districts on February 15. See this story. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.
