Group Wants Justices to Lift Limits on Political Giving
By Marcia Coyle July 17, 2013
For its first brief in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Cause of Action Institute picked a controversial cause: an end to certain limits on individual contributions to federal candidates, political action committees and political party committees.
McCutcheon and Republican National Committee v. Federal Election Commission offers the Supreme Court an another opportunity to deregulate money in elections following its much criticized ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010. The justices will hear arguments in the case this fall.
The Cause of Action Institute, which describes itself as a nonprofit, nonpartisan government-accountability organization “that fights to protect economic opportunity when federal regulations, spending and cronyism threaten it,” has joined the legal fight with an amicus brief supporting challengers Shaun McCutcheon and the Republican National Committee (RNC).
“This is their first Supreme Court brief, but it’s right down their alley,” said Barnaby Zall of Weinberg, Jacobs & Tolani in Rockville, Md., counsel of record on the amicus brief. “They are an organization focused on government accountability and they work mainly with the [Freedom of Information Act]. They understand disclosure and rules. They looked at this issue as combining lots of issues that affected them.”
Under federal campaign finance laws, there are two types of limits on political contributions by individuals. Base limits restrict the amount an individual may contribute to a particular candidate committee ($2,600 per election); national party committee ($32,400 per calendar year); state, district and local party committee ($10,000 per calendar year (combined limit)); and political action committee (PAC) ($5,000 per calendar year). Aggregate limits restrict the total contributions that individuals may make in a biennial—two-year—election cycle.
McCutcheon and the RNC urge the justices to apply the most searching scrutiny—strict scrutiny—to those biennial limits and find that the limits violate the First Amendment. Under the aggregate limits, individuals may contribute $48,600 to candidate committees and $74,600 to non-candidate committees, of which no more than $48,600 may go to non-national party committees (state, district and local party committees (combined) and PACs).
The amicus brief by Cause of Action Institute walks the justices through the last 40 years of changes in the campaign spending and disclosure environment. Those changes, it argues, undercut the original rationale for the aggregate limits.
“In an era in which parties and campaigns compete not only with other like entities, but also with independent voices armed with the latest technology and an almost limitless ability to uncover, analyze and publish contributor information, does the rationale for the current aggregate limits survive?” the brief asks.
The rationale for the limits, according to Congress in 1974, was to prevent circumvention of the limits on individual contributions. As the Supreme Court said in its landmark campaign finance ruling, Buckley v. Valeo: “Congress was surely entitled to conclude that disclosure was only a partial measure, and that contribution ceilings were a necessary legislative concomitant to deal with the reality or appearance of corruption inherent in a system permitting unlimited financial contributions, even when the identities of the contributors and the amounts of their contributions are fully disclosed.”
But what was true of disclosure in 1974 is not true today, the institute posits in one of two key arguments.
“ ‘Fully disclosed,’ in 1974, meant buried in a mountain of paper filings” in a few offices, according to the institute, with little public access.
“Today, there are effective and efficient public and private alternatives, all designed to disclose and publicize any evasions of the contribution limit,” the brief argues. “The Justice Department, the media, and private organizations all use these technologies to monitor, in real-time, campaigns and donors, and release the results on the Internet free of charge, in formats expressly designed to be used by relatively unsophisticated analysts and observers.”
That difference between today and 40 years ago, the brief adds, demonstrates that the aggregate limits are no longer tailored to the problem that Congress was addressing.
And then there is Citizens United. That 5-4 decision lifting the ban on corporate and union independent spending, along with other court decisions, has created alternative methods for individuals to speak during campaigns, the institute says. That new freedom to speak has removed the major incentive to circumvent individual contribution limits.
“Those alternative means are readily available to cautious donors now,” the brief explains. “These lawful, compliant expenditures can be made by one speaker or in conjunction with others.”
The effect of the limits today is “to punish those few donors who want to support more candidates directly than the aggregate limits permit. Thus the aggregate limits are simply another attempt to prevent persons of wealth (or those who seek to promote challengers or innovative candidates) from associating in the manner they choose.”
Daniel Epstein, the institute’s executive director and former investigative counsel for the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said the aggregate limits do not protect against the most serious type of political corruption today—so-called dark money contributions for which the identity of the donor does not have to be disclosed.
“We don’t usually write amicus briefs,” Epstein said. “Most of our litigation is directly representing clients. The reason we were motivated to work with Zall is he is obviously an election law expert and we tend to be free market. You want a marketplace of ideas not just in terms of economic transactions but in terms of speech as well. One of the things we basically argue is that the contribution limits are both over-inclusive and under-inclusive. It would have a potential limit on the kinds of discussions that we viewed as important. Minority groups, bloggers and others might be adversely affected by the limits.”
The ability of someone who wants to violate the law has diminished substantially, according to Zall. “That is recognized by the Department of Justice and others, but the interpretations of the law have not changed” he said, adding that the institute’s brief brings “a realization that the old interpretations don’t work in the new environment. What they end up doing is causing more problems than they would solve.”
