from Ballot Access News
Connecticut Lawsuit Over Discriminatory Public Funding Set for January 13, 2010
December 8th, 2009
The U.S. Court of Appeals, 2nd circuit, will hear Connecticut’s appeal in Green Party of Connecticut v Garfield on January 13, 2010. The issue is whether the Constitution prohibits states from passing public funding measures for state office that are strongly discriminatory in favor of Democratic and Republican candidates, and strongly discriminatory against independent candidates. The 2nd circuit is only giving 15 minutes for the hearing, which suggest the 3 judges will strongly rely on reading the briefs, which, for the most part, are still being written.
From my perspective, this is what is wrong with the entire mindset of turning to government to advance social justice of any sort.
Government power is always captured by the corporate and other powers that be and turned to their advantage. I don’t think this is because we have the wrong people in office, but due to the incentive structure that is fundamental to the nature of monopoly government.
Quarter million signatures? It may as well be a million, or two million…
Just the fact that this appeal will not be heard until Jan. means that a nonRepublicrat that is running for governor will all ready have lost valuable needed to collect the nearly quarter million valid signatures that would be needed to qualify if running for governor.
I just had to write a comment to underline the significance of this:
Because so many progressives want public campaign funding (which probably has its merits), some duopolists co-opt that message, and then write bills that promise “public campaign funding” in a sunshiney way, but have the more drastic effect of giving lots of money to Dems and Reps and making life harder on independent/third party candidates.
Often, the rules are written so that it would be very difficult for an independent or third party candidate to hit the benchmarks or meet the requirements for public funding.