Posted on 07/21/2006 7:53:50 PM PDT by neverdem
Political parties must be allowed to spend money to directly influence other parties’ primary elections, a state appeals court ruled yesterday, throwing out a century-old prohibition in state law.
That finding, if it stands, will be very important to New York politics, but another aspect of the case could matter even more, election law experts said. The decision can also be read, they said, as allowing parties to take sides in their own primaries, rather than remaining neutral, which is the current practice.
For decades, parties in New York have taken sides in one another’s primaries, in part because of some unusual features in the state’s election laws. The involvement was often indirect, and mostly involved the relationships between the major parties and minor parties that are often their allies.
But state law bans parties from spending money or devoting other significant resources to supporting or opposing candidates in primaries. Yesterday, a five-judge panel of the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court in Albany unanimously struck down that provision as an infringement of free speech.
“Since the time that the statute was enacted, the case law of the United States Supreme Court regarding the First Amendment implications of legislation regulating expenditures in connection with elections has evolved significantly,” the court wrote in an unsigned decision. “Expenditures by political parties in elections are now understood to constitute ‘core’ First Amendment activities entitled to substantial protection.”
Election lawyers said that the ruling opens the door to major and minor parties much more actively taking sides in one another’s primaries, and even to the Republican and Democratic parties trying to influence each other’s contests.
“It might not matter so much on a statewide level, but this could come up fairly often in legislative or local races,” said Lawrence A. Mandelker, an election...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Maybe this can grow some legs to undermine McCain's abomination?
The phrase NY GOP is an acronymic oxymoron.
One of the good things going for NY is the minor-party system, whereby the Conservative Party can run a candidate separate from a RINO, or else endorse the Republican or anyone else, allowing the voter to register his vote (in the general election) for a candidate via whatever party gives an endorsement. I liked the way I could show I supported the Conservative Party more than the Republican Party, even if they were endorsing the same candidate.
I get a kick when a friend who's registered with the GOP whines about getting dunned by them for donations.
And since New York Republicans (and Rudolph Giuliani) are so content to sit on their hands and let Hillary Clinton be their senator, why should the rest of the Republicans suffer their incompetence on the national stage???
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