Tea Party candidate defeats Dick Lugar

Interested in your take on this, Dick:

If you were going to challenge a sore loser law in court, what tack would you take?

Can a case be made that they're bills of attainder?

 

Why the bleep have primaries in the first place? If you want to run for office and meet the legal requirements to do so, run! If people want to vote for you, they will.

Never understood the idea of primaries where only persons registered to one party could vote. It pretty much assures every general election has one Republican vs. one Democrat for every office. That's part of how the political process is broken.

 

Remember the California recall election?

 

Good question, and one that it doesn't seem anyone has addressed in court yet, at least in Indiana. Only three states don't have sore loser laws at this point. Connecticut, as we all know, and also Iowa and New York. The permutations are a little bit different, but I think the effect is mostly the same. At first I thought that maybe you could make some statutory interpretation challenge that the law simply means you can't run as a member of that party, but the language is pretty airtight: "... is not eligible to become a candidate for the same office in the next general or municipal election."

Perhaps some substantive due process challenge that you have a right to run for office in a general election? Man, that's a stretch.

Interestingly, only about half the states had these laws by the mid-80s. Like I said, now almost everyone does. Not sure if a spate of independent victories around that time scared the bejeesus out of the two parties or what triggered it. I'll have to read into it a little bit more, as there is a (tiny) bit of literature out there on the topic, but not much.

 

No, can't say I do. Do tell.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_gubernatorial_recall_election,_2003

 

Thanks, that makes sense.

It would seem to me that concurrent registrations would solve the same "problem" without exposing a potential legal challenge.

Then again, I can't immediately elucidate why such a law ought be struck down. It just doesn't seem right.

There's something about primaries not really being elections that factors into my thinking, too.

 

I'm sure some political scientist has run these numbers, but I'm curious about whether sore loser laws have contributed to the polarization of American politics. You'd have to know whether people frequently ran as general election third parties before, even in state elections. But I wonder if even the possibility of having a second shot at it, even though most people realized that it wasn't practically feasible once the time came to make the decision, helped keep people in the middle before.

The sore loser academic journal article I found seems to address some of the effects, though it's 63 pages long and I have some things to do for the rest of the day. I'll try to sit down with it this week at some point and post some highlights.

 

Lugar is the only Republican I've voted for consistently. It helps that usually his opponents were shit, but people generally had respect for Lugar's intellectual honesty, and the power that you can accrue after being in the Senate for a while. Remember, this was a guy who once told Ronald Reagan to go fuck himself (not in those words exactly) when he tried to keep Marcos propped up after a sham vote in the Philippines. Lugar also fought Reagan over sanctions for South Africa.

Lugar certainly was conservative on a lot of issues, and he always made sure the spigot was wide open for farm subsidies (he owned a farm, as did many others in Indiana). But for the most part, you never got the sense with Lugar that he made decisions based solely on political expediency.

Actually, the most disappointing thing about him to me was that since Bush II, Lugar had become more anonymous and was much more likely to walk in lockstep with the Republican party for the sake of walking in lockstep. Presumably, Karl Rove at some point must have put the fear of God in him that he could be challenged by the right, so you wonder why Lugar didn't seem to see this coming. If he didn't, I guess that strengthens the argument that he was out of touch, and stayed on well past his usefulness date.

Goodbye, Lugar. Maybe he can go back to his job as a New York police inspector.

 

One thing both parties can, and will, always agree on is laws making it harder for third parties and independents to run.

 

No, I'm sure the law isn't specific enough for it to pertain specifically to Dick Lugar

 

Zeke: Here is your possible Constitutional hook:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Term_Limits,_Inc._v._Thornton

Seems like the case banned state-imposed term limits on Congressmen because states can't impose stricter qualifications on candidates that the federal Constitution.

If there were some challenges to this, at the least I bet you could use this decision to create some circuit splits as courts would try to determine if this was applicable to sore loser laws or distinguishable.