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Sunday, October 24, 2010
Courts - Study finds: "A conservative Indiana lawyer engineered the string of legal victories that have enabled corporations and wealthy individuals to channel tens of millions of dollars into this year's midterm elections secretly"
Greg Gordon of McClatchy Newspapers has a lengthy story today headed "The lawyer who argued that money is speech." A few quotes:
James Bopp Jr., a Republican-backed lawyer from Terre Haute, Ind., who has fought campaign finance laws for 30 years, filed the lawsuit that led to last January's Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited corporate and union dollars to bankroll independent election ads.Bopp said he is now challenging laws in at least a dozen states - California, Florida, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Ohio, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin - that require disclosure of the names of campaign contributors. * * *
Common Cause and another liberal-leaning group, Public Campaign, commissioned Klein Research Services to conduct the study of Bopp's record, headlined "The Man Behind Our Secret Elections." McClatchy obtained an advance copy.
Reached by telephone, Bopp chuckled at the findings and said: "Oh gosh, this is probably the most credit I've ever gotten. And I already think I get an unwarranted amount of credit, because judges write the opinions."
While the study cited a statement in which he purportedly said he had a 10-year plan to dismantle campaign finance laws, Bopp said that came from a joke he made earlier this year.
"I said I had a 10-year plan in my head," he said. "There's no 10-year plan. There's just things I think about."
Posted by Marcia Oddi on October 24, 2010 07:11 PM
Posted to Courts in general