Four years after the Supreme Court deregulated independent campaign spending in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the high court is poised to yet again turn American elections upside down. The court is expected to rule any day now on McCutcheon v. FEC, another potentially landmark constitutional challenge that could shake up campaign financing as dramatically as Citizens United did in 2010. While no one can predict how the court will rule, oral arguments in October suggest that conservatives in the majority remain as eager as ever to dismantle money limits. At issue in McCutcheon is the constitutionality of existing overall limits on how much a contributor may give to candidates and political parties in a single election cycle. Alabama businessman Shaun McCutcheon, who brought the challenge, argues that the $123,200 cap on total contributions per cycle violates his First Amendment rights.
The limit’s defenders say that tossing it out will bring back the “soft money” days when donors freely wrote large, unrestricted checks to the political parties. That soft money, banned by the 2002 law known as McCain-Feingold, was raised by the elected officials who ran the parties — and wrote the bills that the big donors lobbied for and against. It was an invitation to abuse, a parade of lawmakers and donors told the court when it took up McConnell v. FEC, the constitutional challenge that upheld the soft money ban in 2003.
But the Supreme Court has partially changed hands since then, and today’s right-leaning justices appear to have forgotten that unrestricted, multimillion-dollar contributions to the political parties ever drew fire. In Citizens United, the high court concluded that unlimited campaign spending by unions and corporations (including incorporated nonprofits) can’t corrupt anybody when the spending is independent — not coordinated with candidates or parties.
Now some on the court argue that big money should be legal for political parties as well. As Justice Antonin Scalia told Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., during the McCutcheon oral arguments: “It seems to me fanciful to think that the sense of gratitude that an individual Senator or Congressman is going to feel because of a substantial contribution to the Republican National Committee or Democratic National Committee is any greater than the sense of gratitude that that Senator or Congressman will feel to a PAC which is spending enormous amounts of money in his district or in his state for his election.”
Full Article: Will McCutcheon Replay Citizens United? | Rules of the Game | Beltway Insiders.