On November 5, the U.S.Senate rejected an amendment by Senator Robert Bennett (R-Utah) that would have provided that seats be apportioned in the U.S. House on the basis of how many citizens live in each state, instead of how many persons live in each state. See this story.

It is dismaying that 39 U.S. Senators can support such a proposal, when the 14th amendment, section 2, says “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.” It is also disappointing that newspaper reporters write fairly lengthy stories about this issue and don’t mention the constitutional language.

On November 6, the Tea Party qualified as a party for the Florida ballot. It should not be confused with the Boston Tea Party, which was already a ballot-qualified party in Florida. See this story.

It is very easy for a group to qualify itself in Florida. Florida now has 32 qualified parties. The vast majority of them have never run a candidate for anything, because (except for president) the filing fees for candidates are so high.

Here is the Libertarian Party’s response brief in Libertarian Party of New Hampshire v Gardner, the federal case over whether unqualified parties should be allowed to use stand-in presidential candidates on their petitions. Although it is short (only five pages), it has a good compendium of other federal court decisions that say in some areas of election laws, states may not discriminate against unqualified parties, relative to qualified ones. This is in response to the state’s brief, which seemed to argue that states are free to discriminate in all areas of election law, but only cited examples of cases in which unqualified parties need not be treated equally for purposes of having their members serve on election boards.