The Future of Soft Money in Federal Elections: The 527 Reform Act of 2005 and the First Amendment

President George W. Bush signed the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002 (“BCRA”) into law on March 27, 2002, and when it became law on November 6, 2002, BCRA marked the first significant revision of the federal laws controlling the financing of campaigns for federal office since the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (“FECA”). Title I of BCRA banned national parties and officeholders from raising and spending “soft money.” Soft money can be defined simply as contributions that are not subject to FECA’s contribution regulations while “hard money” refers to contributions that do fall under FECA’s domain. FECA established a series of mandatory limits on contributions to candidates and mandatory ceilings on expenditures. Senator John McCain (R-AZ), one of the bill’s co-sponsors who has fought for significant campaign finance reform for more than half a decade, hoped the law would “restore the public’s faith in government.” President Bush hailed BCRA by stating that “[a]ll of the American electorate will benefit from these measures to strengthen our democracy.

Representative Government, Representative Court? The Supreme Court as a Representative Body

In this Symposium Essay, I propose, as a thinking matter, that we expand the number of Supreme Court justices to increase the representation of various demographic groups on the Court. In Part I, I advance the argument that the Court should be regarded as a demographically representative body of the citizens of the United States, and in Part II, I argue that the Court should be enlarged to ensure diverse representation of all voices on the most powerful judicial body of our nation

National intelligence estimate reaffirms Pakistan’s role in defeating Taliban

The latest National Intelligence Estimates (NIE) for Afghanistan and Pakistan report what most analysts of the region and the wars there already know: the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan won’t work unless the Pakistani government and military rounds up its Taliban allies and breaks the back of the various groups that constitute the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan

Automatic Spanish translation of SQuAD dataset for multi-lingual question answering

Recently, multilingual question answering became a crucial research topic, and it is receiving increased interest in the NLP community.However, the unavailability of large-scale datasets makes it challenging to train multilingual QA systems with performance comparableto the English ones. In this work, we develop the Translate Align Retrieve (TAR) method to automatically translate the Stanford QuestionAnswering Dataset (SQuAD) v1.1 to Spanish. We then used this dataset to train Spanish QA systems by fine-tuning a Multilingual-BERTmodel. Finally, we evaluated our QA models with the recently proposed MLQA and XQuAD benchmarks for cross-lingual ExtractiveQA. Experimental results show that our models outperform the previous Multilingual-BERT baselines achieving the new state-of-the-artvalues of 68.1 F1 on the Spanish MLQA corpus and 77.6 F1 on the Spanish XQuAD corpus. The resulting, synthetically generatedSQuAD-es v1.1 corpora, with almost 100% of data contained in the original English version, to the best of our knowledge, is the firstlarge-scale QA training resource for Spanish.This work is supported in part by the Spanish Ministe-rio de Econom ́ıa y Competitividad, the European RegionalDevelopment Fund and the Agencia Estatal de Investi-gaci ́on, through the postdoctoral senior grant Ram ́on y Ca-jal (FEDER/MINECO) amd the project PCIN-2017-079(AEI/MINECO).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Stretching The Limits Of International Law: The Challenge Of Terrorism

When this panel was originally conceived, we could not have anticipated the extent to which the limits of international law would have to be stretched by events in the city where our conference would be held

Party Conventions Are a Free-For-All for Influence Peddling: The Soft Money Loophole for Lobbyists

The Democratic and Republican national conventions are supposed to be publicly financed electoral events with reasonable ethics restrictions on influence-peddling by lobbyists. However, the conventions have become mostly privately financed soirees funded by corporations and lobbying firms that seek favors from the federal government. The unlimited soft money donations from special interests to pay for the conventions, and the lavish parties and wining and dining at the conventions, run counter to the federal election law and congressional ethics rules