On November 13, President Obama formally announced that Bob Bauer will be the new counsel to the office of the President. Bauer is an expert on election law, especially campaign finance law, and has had a blog, www.moresoftmoneyhardlaw.com. He has represented the Democratic National Committee in lawsuits involving campaign finance. He has been a force in favor of freeing political parties from campaign finance restrictions, especially the parts of the McCain-Feingold law that make restrict the ability of national political parties to receive large donations and also restrict the ability of national political parties to spend money and to coordinate with state units of that same party.

On November 12, a lower state court judge in Wheeling, West Virginia, ruled that a city initiative to repeal the two-police-in-one-police-car law should not appear on the ballot. The circulators didn’t notarize the signatures. The local rule for initiatives is peculiar, because state law does not require candidate ballot access petitions to be notarized. See this story.

The circulators say they may do their petition all over again. They also point out that the City Clerk hadn’t told them about the notarization requirement and had even accepted the unnotarized petitions. The city had then sued the petitioners to get a definitive ruling. This is the same case in which the Fraternal Order of Police had intervened in the case, and had won an earlier ruling that the city should make the names and addresses of signers available to the Police. The case is Wheeling v Jones, Ohio County, 09-c-270.

On October 29, a 3-judge U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., dismissed the case Rodearmel v Clinton, 1:09-cv-171. Here is the 12-page opinion. It says that the State Department foreign service officer who filed the lawsuit lacks standing. The U.S. Constitution, Article I, sec. 6, clause 2, says that no member of Congress may be appointed to a federal executive position if Congress had increased the salary of that position while that member of Congress had been in Congress. The Defendant in this case is Hillary Rodham Clinton, who went from being a U.S. Senator, to Secretary of State, even though the salary of the Secretary of State had risen while Clinton was in the U.S. Senate.

On November 3, Judicial Watch, which sponsored the lawsuit, asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its appeal. Thanks to Bill Van Allen for this news.