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Ballot Access News reports:
On August 5, U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer, a Bush Jr. appointee, ruled against Gary Johnson and Jill Stein in their debates lawsuit. The case had been filed on September 28, 2015, and is Johnson v Commission on Presidential Debates, U.S. District Court, D.C., 1:15cv-1580.
[...] The 27-page decision[Redirects to a PDF] [...] says, "Because Plaintiffs have no standing and because antitrust laws govern commercial markets and not political activity, those claims fail as a matter of well-established law."
[...] Footnote three, based on the judge's own research (or the research of her clerks), has factual errors. The judge relied on election returns published by the FEC, but the FEC returns do not say which candidates were [...] in states with a majority of electoral college votes, and the opinion's list of candidates is erroneous.
[...] Another factual error in the decision is on page 21. The decision says Ralph Forbes, an independent candidate for U.S. Senate, lost a case over debates in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1998. Actually Forbes was a candidate for U.S. House.
In the comments, Richard Winger notes a similar case.
the lawsuit Level the Playing Field v FEC is still pending, before another judge, in the same court
The presidential debates were previously moderated by the League of Women Voters (1976, 1980, 1984). The Democrats and Republicans screwed things up in 1988. The Commission on Presidential Debates, a corporation controlled by the Democratic and Republican parties, has run each of the presidential debates held since 1988.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 08 2016, @10:03PM
Because the one we have sucks. It's obviously not working, as proven by our broken political system, which should be reason enough, but I'll point out some massive problems with it:
1) the Electoral College: the President is elected by the states, not by the people, and the rules are different in every state. Worse, the ratio of voters:electors is different state-to-state, meaning not every citizen is equal (people in tiny states like RI have more power per vote).
2) the Second Amendment: no one can agree on what it means.
3) the separation of powers and checks and balances system doesn't work. In short, having people elect both the legislators in that branch, and the President in the executive branch, frequently leads to gridlock. This is not an efficient way to run a large, modern nation of over 300M people. All other successful modern democratic republics have Parliamentary systems, not ones like ours. Even when we conquered Germany and Japan in WWII and helped them set up new governments (and again in Iraq much more recently), did we encourage them to set up Presidential systems like ours? Nope, they all got parliamentary systems. And at least for Germany and Japan, they seem to have worked out rather well. The advantages of a parliamentary system are that it's quite normal for there to be more than 2 parties, and the executive is elected by the Parliament, not the people, so there's no gridlock like we get when we have one party controlling Congress and another party in the White House. Furthermore, because there's more than 2 parties, and none of them have a majority, they have to form coalitions to get stuff done; no one has enough power to force their way unopposed or to bring everything to a halt.
The Bill of Rights is good, but should be folded into the main document. We can actually see this with the Confederate Constitution (the Constitution the Confederate States wrote for themselves): they just took the regular US Constitution, stuck the Bill of Rights into the main document, and made a few other changes several of which were actually really good ideas (but the one legalizing slavery wasn't). But the biggest problem is the whole tricameral system; it just isn't that great in practice and leads to too many problems: gridlock, and an executive with too much power. I'm sure it seemed like a great idea in the late 1700s, when all the other powerful nations were still monarchies, but humanity has come a long way since then. We should get rid our of NIH problem and just adopt the system that most other decent nations have.
4) Another change I'd like to see is the ability to redraw state borders more easily to improve administrative efficiency. We have too many states, and their borders are entirely the product of history rather than modern usefulness. Any time there's a state border dividing a metro area, that's something that should not exist. A few examples: Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine would be better off combined into a single state, and New York should be broken in two, with "upstate" being one state, and NYC and its surrounding areas in NY, CT, and NJ being another. WDC should be turned into a new state, along with all of northern VA and much of MD too. California should be broken into at least 2 states. A new Constitution should make it easier to make changes like these.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09 2016, @12:01AM
I fail to see why we need an entirely new constitution for this. We can simply amend the old one. If you have enough support to make a new constitution from scratch, then you have enough support for constitutional amendments. And there's nothing wrong with amendments; whether the bill of rights is in the "main" part of the constitution or not is irrelevant.
But I fear what sorts of authoritarian nonsense people would come up with. Would these changes be good for individual liberty or not?
2) the Second Amendment: no one can agree on what it means.
There are also disputes over the first, fourth, fifth, etc. amendments. The fact of the matter is, if someone likes or dislikes a particular policy, they often don't care what the constitution says. Authoritarians are shredding our constitution and they would do the same to any new one; they are a plague.