Mark Schmitt

“What will the effect be of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United on elections?” Scott Lemieux asks below. For all the reasons he describes, the decision is enormous, radical, and wrong, and it will undoubtedly have sweeping impact on future election law as well as other areas of First Amendment and corporate law. But it is […]

At a Brookings Institution event this morning, four of the most prominent mainstream scholar/advocates of campaign finance reform set forward a new approach — albeit one that might seem familiar to Prospect readers. Tom Mann of Brookings, Norman Ornstein from AEI, Michael Malbin of the Campaign Finance Institute and Tony Corrado of Colby College proposed […]

Before the holidays, I wrote a column, “Don’t Fear the Fiscal Reapers,” arguing that a commission to address the long-term fiscal crisis need not be the disaster that many progressives fear — an excuse for massive cuts in Social Security and Medicare — but could actually do some good, including providing cover for the increases […]

If I were a more autocratic boss, Tim Fernholz would be having a very bad day for his rather sanguine reaction to the news that Sen. Chris Dodd is retiring. Yes, Tim, it is a bad, and sad thing — unless one’s only interest is in “freeing up resources for other races” at the Democratic […]