LNC v. FEC opinion (D.C. Cir.)

Date
Court Level
Appellate

On May 21, 2019, the en banc D.C. Circuit rejected all three of the Libertarian Party’s constitutional challenges to the federal contribution limits, finding that the First Amendment does not require “as applied” exceptions from facially valid contribution limits for supposedly non-corruptive bequests, and upholding the higher special-purpose “cromnibus” limits as a valid “tweak in Congress’s decades-long project to fine-tune” our campaign finance laws. The decision reaffirms that contribution limits are permissible preventative anti-corruption measures and that courts should defer to Congress’s empirical judgments about where precisely to set the dollar amounts of such limits.