Moyers & Company: The Next Citizens United is Coming
Tara Malloy, deputy executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, which favors campaign contribution limits, compares the deregulatory approach of those like Bopp who are fighting against limits to peeling an onion.
“First it was the aggregate limits, which was sort of like the outermost protection. Now they’re going for the party limits, which again seems one degree removed from a direct contribution for the candidate,” she said. “I assume if they were successful here, they would go for the rest.”
What started off as a case about whether contribution limits were too low “suddenly became about the constitutionality of contribution limits altogether, or what kind of incredibly strong legislative record you would need in order to have any kind of contribution limits,” said the Campaign Legal Center’s Malloy, whose organization has taken part in the case as a “friend of the court.”
But Malloy, whose organization is representing Delaware in defense of the law, said overturning the law “would act sort of as a check against state innovation in the disclosure area, where states are sort of leading the charge because Congress has been … in a quagmire.”