Today's Supreme Court opinion in FEC v. Davis nominally deals with a relatively tangential portion of the McCain-Feingold law; but the 5-4 decision has much broader implications, laying the groundwork for striking down limits on spending by corporations and unions. It also could make public financing plans less effecting...

You can find his video announcement here. The news is currently the lead story on the NYT website.

I find Senator Obama's decision completely defensible and unsurprising. The system is broken. We cannot expect opt ins by successful candidates, especially in the internet age which...

Via TPM comes this interview in the Boston Herald in which Sen. McCain says that there's nothing he can do to stop 527 attacks on Sen. Obama. As TPM notes: "Obama's finance team has explicitly instructed donors not to give money to those groups. McCain, by contrast, seems...

Today's NY Times editorializes that Senator Obama, should he be the Democratic nominee, should opt into the public financing system in the general election:

Earlier in the campaign, Mr. Obama vowed to accept the tighter alternative of public subsidy and its spending limitations -- a not-so-shabby $85 million...

Here it comes on a lazy Friday afternoon:

TPM Muckraker has the details. The letter from von Spakovsky is here. More from AP and Roll Call on the President "reluctantly" accepting the withdrawal.

I think this almost certainly breaks the logjam for FEC nominations. I expect...

Today's 4-3 decision of the California Supreme Court striking down under the California Constitution a California statute limiting "marriage" to opposite-sex couples could help John McCain in the fall. (More coverage of the opinion itself at How Appealing.) The decision is based upon the California Constitution, which can...

As a political junkie, I've been focused on the close race in Indiana, but another important political story, perhaps not coincidentally, dropped at the same time: President Bush has made a move to break the impasse over Federal Election Commission nominations. But rather than jettison the controversial nominee to the...

Today's much anticipated decision in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board is a significant win for those who support stricter voter identification laws, even if they support such laws for partisan purposes. It will encourage further litigation, because it relegates challenges to laws imposing onerous burdens on a small...

The voluntary public financing system for U.S. presidential candidates, established in the post-Watergate era, is in its last throes. As it collapses, presidential candidates have been calculating---and recalculating--the advantages of opting in or out.

Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has accused Sen. Barack Obama, the likely (though...

Perhaps it is too early to begin this discussion, with the heat of the Obama-Clinton contest still rising, but Democrats have an important question to consider for the next election: should the norms of equality that we apply to our general elections apply to the Democratic presidential nomination process? I...

That's the provocative thesis of this article by Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen in The Politico. And at Slate, Christopher Beam gives a similar answer: "Today's the New York Times A1 piece on Hillary Clinton, 'Clinton Facing Narrower Path to Nomination,' is an exercise in understatement. It...

The more I think about how to handle the Democratic delegates from Michigan and Florida, the more I am convinced that a revote, especially in Florida, is the wrong way to go and that some kind of political compromise, such as seating the Florida delegates but giving them half a...

There are strong reasons, both equitable and political, to do something about the current standoff over whether Florida's delegates to this summer's Democratic National Convention should be seated. But the idea currently floated by Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) of conducting a "do-over" via an all vote-by-mail primary makes me...

Though the New York Times story about Sen. McCain's alleged improprieties with a lobbyist is dominating the news, another story could prove equally or more important to the success of McCain's candidacy. Yesterday's FEC decision barring McCain, at least temporarily, from withdrawing from the presidential public financing...