Supreme Court Weighs Campaign Contribution Limits
By ADAM LIPTAK
New York Times
October 8, 2013
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday seemed prepared to strike down a part of federal campaign finance law left intact by its decision in Citizens United in 2010: overall limits on direct contributions from individuals to candidates.
The justices seemed to divide along familiar ideological lines.
“By having these limits, you are promoting democratic participation,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said. “Then the little people will count some.”
Justice Antonin Scalia responded, sarcastically, that he assumed “a law that only prohibits the speech of 2 percent of the country is O.K.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who probably holds the crucial vote, indicated that he was inclined to strike down overall limits on contributions to several candidates, but not a separate overall limit on contributions to several political committees.
The case, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, No. 12-536, is a sort of sequel to the court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United, which struck down limits on independent campaign spending by corporations and unions. The new case is an attack on the other main pillar of federal campaign finance regulation: limits on contributions made directly to political candidates and party committees.
The case was brought by Shaun McCutcheon, an Alabama businessman, and the Republican National Committee. It is in one way modest and in another ambitious. It does not attack the familiar basic limits on contributions from individuals to candidates or party committees. The $2,600 cap on contributions to a given candidate in each election, for instance, is not at issue.
Instead, the challengers take issue with separate overall limits of $48,600 every two years for individuals’ contributions to all federal candidates and $74,600 to political party committees. ( Federal law continues to ban direct contributions to candidates or political parties from corporations and unions.)
“These limits,” said Erin E. Murphy, a lawyer for Mr. McCutcheon, “simply seek to prevent individuals from engaging in too much First Amendment activity.”
Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. responded that the aggregate limits were an important tool to prevent circumvention of the base limits. Allowing multiple contributions to interlocking political committees affiliated with candidates and parties could, he said, effectively funnel large sums from individuals to support given candidates.
“Aggregate limits combat corruption,” Mr. Verrilli said.
Should the court agree that overall limits are unconstitutional, its decision could represent a fundamental reassessment of a basic distinction established in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976, which said contributions may be regulated more strictly than expenditures because of their potential for corruption.
Independent spending, the court said, is political speech protected by the First Amendment. But contributions may be capped, the court said, in the name of preventing corruption. Almost in passing, the court added that aggregate contribution limits were a “quite modest restraint upon protected political activity” that “serves to prevent evasion” of the base limits.
Last year, a three-judge panel of the Federal District Court in Washington upheld the overall limits, saying they were justified by the need to prevent the circumvention of the basic limits.
“Although we acknowledge the constitutional line between political speech and political contributions grows increasingly difficult to discern,” Judge Janice Rogers Brown wrote for the court, “we decline plaintiffs’ invitation to anticipate the Supreme Court’s agenda.”
The court led by Chief Justice Roberts has so far been consistently hostile to campaign finance limits in its half-dozen decisions in argued cases on the subject so far. The five more conservative justices have voted together in all of those cases, though Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. have taken a more incremental approach than the bolder one called for by Justices Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony M. Kennedy.
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