The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on October 8 in McCutcheon v Federal Election Commission. Here is the reply brief of the Republican National Committee, and here is Shaun McCutcheon’s reply brief. These are the last briefs. The issue is federal limits on the amount of total contributions that an individual may make, to all candidates and committees combined.
A Kentucky Libertarian, David Patterson, has announced his intention to win the party’s U.S. Senate nomination for 2014 and to appear on the ballot. If he gets the required 5,000 signatures, he will be the first minor party or independent candidate to have petitioned onto the statewide Kentucky ballot in a midterm congressional year since 1978. The American Party had petitioned in 1978 for a U.S. Senate candidate.
Kentucky requires a party to receive 2% for President, to obtain qualified status. The only minor parties that have met this threshold in Kentucky in the last 80 years are the American Party 1968-1972, the Anderson Coalition Party 1980-1984, and the Reform Party 1996-2000. Because the qualification standard is rather difficult in practice, most of the time there are no qualified minor parties in Kentucky; and as a result, few minor party candidates, especially in midterm years.
The Kentucky Libertarian Party has only twice had a candidate for U.S. Senate on the ballot. Those two instances were in 1992 and 1996, and both times, the candidate’s name was listed on the same petition as the party’s presidential candidate, so there was no extra petitioning work in those years.
The Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court will hear arguments in Nomination Papers of Nevin Mindlin, 1392 C.D. 2013, on September 12, Thursday, at 9:30 a.m. in Harrisburg. This is the case over whether independent candidates must use a Substitution Committee. The lower court had ruled against the candidate, who is an independent running for Mayor of Harrisburg.
Pennsylvania law provides that petitions for the nominees of unqualified parties, as well as independent candidates, use the same type of petition form, and that form has a space for the group, or the independent candidate, to list members of a “substitution committee.” This is a useful idea, for minor parties. But it makes little sense for a true independent candidate. The purpose of having a “substitution committee” is to replace any of the candidates listed on the petition, if they die or withdraw. But generally, an independent candidate has no need of a substitution committee, because the independent candidate generally feels that if he or she withdraws, there is no desire or rationale to come up with a substitute. Yet so far the state takes the position that independent candidates must have a substitution committee. Mindlin submitted enough valid signatures to be on the ballot, but he was still kept off, because he didn’t fill in the part of the petition that asks for names of members of his substitution committee.
Last week, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, who is now a Libertarian, endorsed Rob Sarvis, the Libertarian Party nominee for Governor of Virginia. That was enough to get a fairly short article about the endorsement in Richmond’s daily newspaper, the Times-Dispatch. See here.
The Des Moines Register has this story about Professor Charles Wheelan’s Centrist Party, and how it is organizing in Iowa and some other states.
