Hans breaks the news over at his Heritage blog:
Federal district court Judge John Gibney has just issued a ruling in Richmond finding that the Virginia requirement that ballot petition circulators must be state residents is a violation of the First Amendment. However, he also held that the four GOP candidates who failed to make it onto the Virginia ballot because they did not meet the 10,000-signature requirement had waited too late to raise their constitutional claims. (Perry did not file suit until the end of December and the other three candidates joined his lawsuit last week.)
Under the legal doctrine of laches, parties with a claim have an obligation to assert it and cannot engage in unreasonable or unjustified delay.
So it’s just Romney and Paul on the Virginia ballot after all. Kind of ironic, when you think about it — the GOP base will have no representation on the ballot in the party’s own primary, in a state it must win in November.
For the Institutional Republicans, this is a feature and not a bug.
Subotai Bahadur
This is a big deal.
Virginia is gonna get a lot of heat from this.
I don’t get it. How does it benefit Virginia to limit their own choices on the ballot?
I wasn’t holding out much hope for this as there is that pesky little ‘rule of law’ issue.
I still say, since there is no write-in, show up at the polls, receive a ballot, then cast the ballot unmarked.
The difference between the voter turn out number and the votes cast represents ‘None of the Above’.
Yes, it’s lame. But it’s all we Virginians have. Maybe it will give delegates to the national convention the leverage to not commit to either Romney or the Ronulan.
#4 P. Henry Saddleburr
I still say, since there is no write-in, show up at the polls, receive a ballot, then cast the ballot unmarked.
The difference between the voter turn out number and the votes cast represents ‘None of the Above’.
BRAVO ZULU!
Subotai Bahadur
So….before they filed, the issue wasn’t ripe, and after they filed, laches applied?
I guess that depends on what your definition of GOP base is. I’ve been in the GOP all my life and am planning on voting for Romney (just as I did in the previous go round when everyone calling him the conservative conadidate). Sounds as if you’re criticizing Romney for being the one organized enough to get on the ballot. That’s what we need in a president (among other things). What were the others doing, twiddling their thumbs? They knew the rules. They were published. Pretty inept, wouldn’t you think? We’re supposed to pity them?
Voting for Paul, but I agree with the rest of it: They knew they needed 10,000.
1. The Virginia GOP recommends 15,000 just in case some get thrown out, and some of the sore losers are pretending there were 15,000 REQUIRED.
2. Newt lives in Mclean so he should have been aware. Perry (or was it Santorum?) claimed at first that he’d turned in enough but later admitted he’s only turned in 6000 or so.
3. Different states get to have different standards, and if you want to be Leader of the Free World, you ought to be able to meet some difficult standards. And… politics is what we do up here in NoVa; it’s a “company town”! Every political view is represented here. You could probably get most of the ones you need, just by hanging out on the GMU campus (yes, you need some from all the counties). Probably what Paul did, since all the college students like him..
4. Kind of pathetic if you didn’t succeed on your own merits, and your solution is to whine “It’s toooooo harrrrrrdddddd” and file a lawsuit. Not exactly the guy you want in charge when it’s time to cut the budget to the bone.
It is far from evident that, for example, Gingrich did not submit 10000 signatures with 400 from each district, as VA law requires. It seems that the VA GOP establishment pretends that there is text in the Presidential nominee clause of the ballot access law, that requires that there be an address for the signatures to be valid. There is no such requirement.
In any case, it is not the rights of the candidates which are being abrogated here, but my right to vote for a candidate of my choice to be counted.
If you are fine with that, to hell with you. If Romney and Paul are fine with that, to hell with them.
I think the practical effects are that a.) GOP votes are going to be lost by this, no doubts. People wil stay at home in the fall absent a sparkling conservative VP pick or some kind of improvement in performance by Romney, with perhaps an attitude akin to “well, you got nominated without my input, you can win it without me too”; b.) if anyone runs third party, they will end up doing better in Virginia than they otherwise would have, as a protest vote by those who would not have done so normally but do not want to swallow their resentment at being presented Romney as a fair accompli; and c.) if a credible third party ever actually does happen, Virignia is very good ground as an initial base state for a while, because things like this are usually the final straws on the camel’s back, no matter whatever the reasons they happened. This is because at some point the stench of incompetence and stupidity and/or a belief that a rigged game is being played (with odds always favoring the house) can become so attached to something, fairly or not, that people become fed up and detemined to take no more if they can get a chance not to, and then there is no chance for survival if a reasonable competitor comes along. Happens all the time in the business world–look at where Sears ended up. Do their stores take Visa now? One would hope.
“fait accompli”, not “fair”. My mandatory mispelling of the day, it would seem.
Misspelling, too.
No one asked me to sign their petition, nor any of the other voters in the house. Go ahead and send a third-party candidate over, who wants on the ballot. We’ll sign.
This appears to be the last time this rule can be invoked and the judge has a point about the lateness of the claim and the need for an orderly election. I think this is a good opinion and so does Va’s Attorney General Cuccinelli.
http://weaselzippers.us/2012/01/13/judge-denies-lawsuit-perry-gingrich-santorum-huntsman-off-virginia-primary-ballot/#comment-464363
Sentinel says:
January 13, 2012 at 8:39 pm
U.S. District Judge John Gibney said in his ruling that Perry — along with GOP candidates Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman and Rick Santorum, who all joined in the Texas governor’s lawsuit — waited too long to file the complaint against the state’s ballot requirements.
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On September 30, 2009, Virginia Senators Jim Webb and Mark Warner recommended Gibney for a seat on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
On April 14, 2010, President Obama nominated Gibney to the seat that had been created by the retirement of Judge Robert E. Payne, who had taken senior status in May 2007.
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While I don’t know the particulars of the case, it seems to me the most relevant issue is the timeline between when Perry was officially notified that he did not qualify and when he filed suit. According to court documents, that was only 4 days.
I’m no legal expert, but I don’t believe you have a basis for a lawsuit until your rights have actually been violated. You can’t file a lawsuit based on something that may or may not occur in the future. Since Perry was not formally notified that he would not qualify until Dec. 23rd, and he filed suit on Dec. 27th, that would not seem to be an unreasonable delay.
Haven’t read the opinion, but it looks like the successful part of the challenge was the part about circulators having to be VA residents. If you’re going to challenge that part of the law, you don’t need to wait until you’ve blown the deadline. Your rights aren’t violated by that requirement only if you fail to get on the ballot; your rights are violated from day one, when you begin your campaign in VA and have to comply with it.
That’s why the judge said they waited too long to file suit; by waiting so long, they made it clear that their stated grounds were a pretext for trying to get on the ballot.