Tonight the Wall Street Journal has a fascinating look something we may soon hear a lot more about in a very rushed and chaotic fashion. Last month, an outfit called the Milbank Memorial Fund (as best I can tell a relatively non-ideological foundation focused on health care policy) held a secret one day meeting in Chicago for officials from states who may suddenly find their citizens cut off from Obamacare health care insurance subsidies because of the new GOP challenge to the law.
The verdict. Basically that they’re screwed.
Clinton campaign lawyer files suit against new vote restriction law in Scott Walker’s Wisconsin.
We’re now seeing the on-rush of what we might call for lack of a better word the “why not” or WTF candidates of the 2016 GOP race. Lindsey Graham’s entry into the race makes it basically certain. But it’s hard to see how Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum aren’t more or less in the same category. Certainly every cycle has a few of these folks – either there to make a point, increase name recognition or simply on an ego trip that no one had desire or ability to intervene to stop. But does Lindsey Graham have issues that Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio can’t raise for him? And what does Rick Santorum need to get in the mix? Is Mike Huckabee going to drive up his name recognition for a 2024 run?
Guy who held a Muhammad cartoon contest in front of the Mosque attended by the two guys who wanted to shoot up the Geller Muhammad cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, has now launched a GoFundMe page to raise $10 million “to protect his family.”
Meet the man who is pushing the Supreme Court to end ‘one person, one vote.’
This is not a good climate for defending Denny Hastert. And what I’m about to do isn’t defending Hastert. But I am struck by how rapidly and totally he is being abandoned or written out of the history of various institutions on the basis of what are still only accusations.
This is an intentionally provocative headline. But I think it’s merited.
Republicans in the past always had a big edge when it came to small donor fundraising because they had a very robust direct mail infrastructure and because the demography of the GOP fit nicely with that kind of fundraising. That began to change dramatically a bit over a decade ago when new organizing and the cash channel of the internet got Democrats into the game with a vengeance – first most visibly with the 2004 Dean campaign and then at an entirely new level with President Obama. They were the most visible. But it was happening in smaller races around the country over the course of the decade. But we’re now seeing, at least on the GOP side, how the Supreme Court’s changes in campaign finance laws are rapidly diminishing the role of small donors.