On March 17, the Libertarian National Committee filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia against the part of the McCain-Feingold law that limits how much money a political party may receive in any one calendar year from a bequest from a deceased individual. Here is the complaint. The case is Libertarian National Committee v Federal Election Commission, cv11-562.

Raymond Burrington, a resident of Tennessee, died on April 26, 2007. His will left $217,734 to the Libertarian Party. The McCain-Feingold law limits contributions to national committees of political parties to $30,800 per year, and no exception is made for bequests. The party cannot receive its bequest now, but can only receive the allowed annual amount in any given year. In the meantime most of the bequest sits in a trust account. The justification for limits on how much money anyone can give to a party is that if there were no limit, a wealthy individual might bribe a member of Congress, or the President, by promising to give a very large amount of money to that office-holder’s political party. The U.S. Supreme Court has not recognized any other legal justification for such limits. The lawsuit argues that the justification for limits makes no sense when the donor is deceased.

The lawsuit also challenges the part of the McCain-Feingold law that has been interpreted to make it illegal for political parties to ask for large bequests. The case was assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Robert L. Wilkins, an Obama appointee.

Jack Davis, a former Democratic candidate for the U.S. House in New York, is running in the May 24 special election to fill the vacant U.S. House seat, 26th district. He has just filed an independent candidate petition, with the party label “Tea Party.” He submitted over 12,000 signatures to meet the requirement of 3,500 signatures. New York ballots contain a party logo for each party. The Davis logo is the Liberty Bell, which was also the old logo of the Liberal Party when it was on the ballot 1944 through 2002.

His campaign web page is http://jackdavis.org. He is a wealthy person who won the U.S. Supreme Court case Davis v F.E.C., which struck down the “millionaires’ amendment”. The law that was declared unconstitutional in that case said that when any candidate for Congress spends at least $350,000 of his or her own money, then the ceiling on how much money can be contributed to the opponents in the race is substantially relaxed.

The Indiana legislature is unable to pass bills this session, because all the Democrats in the House have boycotted the session for the last month. A similar Democratic boycott in Wisconsin got much more national publicity, and is now over. See this story about the Indiana legislature. The deadline for bills to have passed their house of origin has passed. If the Democrats come back, though, that deadline might be altered.

Election law bills that are technically dead this year include a bill to require birth certificates for presidential candidates, a bill to eliminate the straight-ticket device, and a bill to provide that the open primary should become a secret open primary (currently, any voter can choose any party’s primary ballot, but the voter on primary day must publicly disclose which ballot he or she is requesting; the bill would make that decision private).