Michael Peroutka, the Constitution Party’s presidential nominee in 2004, won this year’s Republican primary for a seat on the Anne Arundel County Council. This story in the Baltimore Post-Examiner, an on-line news source, explains the distress his candidacy is causing Maryland Republican Party leaders.
On August 18, U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence Piersol granted an injunction, letting independent gubernatorial candidate Michael Myers replace the Lieutenant Governor running mate on the November 2014 ballot. Piersol is a Clinton appointee. This is the first time a federal court in South Dakota has ruled favorably in a ballot access case since 2000. The case is Myers v Gant, 4:14cv-4121.
Myers argued successfully that because South Dakota lets qualified parties replace a nominee who has withdrawn, therefore the Constitution requires that independent candidate tickets must have the same flexibility. The original Lieutenant Governor named on Myers’ ballot access petition had withdrawn and Myers had sued to get the replacement’s name on the ballot.
In 1980, John B. Anderson had not chosen his actual vice-presidential running mate until August 27, after he had finished petitioning in South Dakota and almost all states. South Dakota in 1980 was one of only four states that wouldn’t let Anderson replace the stand-in vice-presidential running mate with the actual vice-presidential candidate, former Governor Patrick Lucey of Wisconsin. Anderson had sued three of the states that wouldn’t let him replace the Vice-President and had won all three lawsuits. But he didn’t get around to suing South Dakota, so this is the first time substitution rights for independents have been recognized in South Dakota.
Ed Garvey of Madison, Wisconsin, has this op-ed in The Capital Times, arguing that Wisconsin should replace its open primary with a semi-closed or closed primary.
On August 11, the federal government filed this brief in Tuaua v U.S.A., in the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. The issue is whether the Constitution requires that persons born in U.S. possessions be considered citizens. Persons born in American Samoa are considered U.S. nationals, not citizens. The government interprets the Fourteenth Amendment to mean that only individuals born in a state are constitutionally entitled to be considered U.S. citizens.
The Fourteenth Amendment says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The plaintiffs argue that persons born in American Samoa are citizens. The federal government disagrees. By statute, Congress has said that persons born in all U.S. possessions except American Samoa are citizens, but Congress has never taken that step for American Samoa.
Under the federal government’s theory, even persons born in the District of Columbia aren’t constitutionally required to be recognized as citizens.
The plaintiffs’ reply brief is due September 8.
On August 16, Montana Democrats, meeting in convention, nominated Amanda Curtis as their nominee for U.S. Senate. She had been elected to the State House in 2012, but she had not running for re-election this year. The party needed a new nominee because the nominee chosen in the party’s June 2014 primary later withdrew. See this story.
