Dinner Table Action et al. v. Schneider et al. and Equal Citizens et al. (Maine Super PAC Contributions)

In November 2024, Maine voters resoundingly approved — by nearly 75% — a citizen-initiated bill that restricts the amounts individuals and entities may contribute to political committees that make independent expenditures — commonly known as “super PACs” — and also requires disclosure of those contributions.

By approving the measure, Mainers were responding to the serious and well-documented threat of corruption posed by these ostensibly “independent” committees, which can generally accept unlimited contributions from almost any source provided they spend those funds independently of candidates. Maine’s new law places a $5,000 cap on the total amount any individual or entity may give annually to a super PAC.

Plaintiffs in the case — two Maine PACs, and two of the PACs’ officers, that seek to fund their independent electoral advocacy with large and undisclosed contributions — filed suit in late 2024 challenging Maine’s law as unconstitutional.

In the past, appellate courts — beginning with the D.C. Circuit 15 years ago in SpeechNow.org v. FEC  — have struck down limits on contributions to super PACs as violative of the First Amendment. SpeechNow and these later analogues all relied on the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Citizens United v. FEC that independent expenditures inherently cannot give rise to corruption or its appearance. These other courts extended this logic to super PACs because of their supposed legal separation from the candidates they support.

The Maine federal district court in this case did the same. In July of 2025, the lower court, likewise relying on Citizens United and the decisions of other appellate courts, enjoined the Maine law as inconsistent with the First Amendment.

That decision is now on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, where, in October 2025, CLC filed an amicus brief to defend the law and detail the many ways that super PACs can — and do — create opportunities for the exchange of corrupt quid pro quos, making it both constitutional and appropriate to limit the contributions they can accept.

What’s At Stake

As documented in CLC’s amicus brief, the faulty assumption in SpeechNow and similar cases that contributions to super PACs inherently cannot lead to corruption or its appearance has now been thoroughly disproven. Instead, the last 15 years of real-world experience with super PACs reveal countless examples of quid pro quo corruption involving super PACs. This record confirms what common sense already suggests: The transfer of massive sums to a super PAC supporting a candidate creates indebtedness on the part of that candidate and thus exposes our political system to a real and unacceptable risk of corruption.

The Supreme Court has long recognized that letting corruption go unchecked harms our democracy by undermining the public’s faith in self-government. Anticorruption measures like Maine’s law are vital to counter the widespread and damaging perception that American democracy is for sale.

Maine voters made their choice clear: The wave of unlimited super PAC contributions unleashed after SpeechNow must be reined in to prevent corruption and reinforce public confidence in democratic governance. The courts should respect that choice.