Today, the Campaign Legal Center filed an amici brief in the U.S. Supreme Court defending the federal aggregate contribution limits and warning that invalidation of the limits would herald a return to the abuses of the “soft money” era that were outlawed by the McCain-Feingold Act and held corruptive by the Supreme Court in 2003.  Absent the challenged limits, individual donors could circumvent the base contribution limits by contributing hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars in “limited” contributions to a huge number of candidates, party committees and PACs each election cycle. 

The Legal Center’s Executive Direct, J. Gerald Hebert, predicted that theMcCutcheon case will be carefully watched by the American people to see if the Supreme Court continues down the dangerous road of overturning common sense campaign finance rules aimed at curbing big money interests from buying politicians.   “In recent years, the Supreme Court has done enormous damage to its institutional interests by handing down decisions that overturn decades of legal precedent and that are harmful to our democracy,” Hebert observed.  “Its decision in the Citizens United case, for example, set the stage for big money to pour into our elections and put our democracy on the auction block to the highest bidders.  Its recent Voting Rights Act decision, devoid of legal reasoning and casting aside nearly fifty years of legal precedent, was another damaging decision.  The Court’s conservative majority looks more and more like a mini-legislature than a judicial branch of government.” 

Hebert added: “It is no wonder that the Court’s reputation among the general public has steadily declined in recent years to its current level of 34% – even below that of the Presidency.  Americans no longer have confidence that the Court can be fair and impartial.  The McCutcheon case presents the Court with a clear choice: will it issue another decision doing more damage to its reputation and undermining our democracy, or will it issue a decision that upholds decades of common sense contribution limits on those who would use their wealth to buy politicians’ votes?” 

A number of citizen, civil rights and watchdog organizations – from AARP to the League of Women Voters – joined the Legal Center in signing onto the brief that outlined the strong governmental interest in preventing the corruption and appearance of corruption inherent in any return to a system of six- and seven-figure solicitations and contributions.  

The challenge was brought by the Republican National Committee (RNC) and contributor Shaun McCutcheon.  Despite clear Supreme Court precedent upholding aggregate contribution limits, the plaintiffs-appellants in McCutcheon v. FECchallenge both the $74,600 aggregate limit on contributions to non-candidate committees and the $48,600 aggregate limit on contributions to candidate committees in a two-year election cycle.

“Striking down the aggregate contribution limits would allow candidates to solicit, and each donor to give, contributions totaling over $1 million per election cycle.  This would open the door to exactly the type of corruption, or at the very least the appearance of corruption, that the Supreme Court cited in upholding the original aggregate contribution limits in Buckley v. Valeo,” said Tara Malloy, Campaign Legal Center Senior Counsel.  “But this suit asks the Court to ignore long-settled precedent and the realities of political fundraising and to believe that politicians are less corruptible and the public is more confident in the integrity of their elected officials than they were in the 1970s—a notion that does not pass the laugh test.  An adverse decision in this case would usher in a new age of rampant influence-buying unmatched by any other period following the Watergate scandal.”

The brief filed by Campaign Legal Center and the other organizations emphasized that if the aggregate limits were invalidated, an individual could contribute $5,200 toward every single House and Senate candidate of the donor’s preferred party, $32,400 to each of that party’s three federal party committees, and $10,000 to each of that party’s fifty state committees for a total of $3.6 million in a two-year election cycle.  The total would be further increased by as many $5,000 contributions to PACs as an individual chose to make.

In September of 2012, a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia concluded that the aggregate limits are justified, and rejected the arguments of the plaintiffs that the limits were unconstitutional.  The Legal Center’s brief in the lower court in support of the limits was cited in the court’s opinion. 

The groups signing onto the brief filed by the Legal Center today included AARP, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Common Cause, The League of Women Voters of the United States, Progressives United and Public Campaign.

To read the brief filed by the Campaign Legal Center and the other organizations, click here.

To read the District Court's decision upholding the aggregate contribution limits, click here.

Late yesterday, the Campaign Legal Center, joined by Democracy 21, filed comments in response to a Federal Election Commission (FEC) Advisory Opinion Request (AOR) 2013-09, which asks the agency to exceed its authority by declaring a statute unconstitutional and announcing that the agency will no longer enforce the statute—even though the Supreme Court has upheld the statute as constitutional.

Specifically, the AOR submitted on behalf of Special Operations Speaks PAC (“SOS PAC”) and U.S. Senate candidate Col. Robert L. Maness, asks whether the PAC may make, and the candidate accept, a contribution exceeding the $2,600 limit applicable to non-multicandidate political committees, up to the $5,000 limit applicable to multicandidate political committees despite the fact the SOS freely admits it has not and will not meet the requirement that it contribute to five or more candidates for federal office in order to qualify as a multicandidate political committee.

In the AOR itself, the requestors acknowledge that the U.S. Supreme Court has reviewed and upheld the requirements for multicandidate committees as a constitutionally permissible means to prevent circumvention of contribution limits.

“The Supreme Court has upheld the requirements in question, yet the requestors ask the FEC to ignore and exceed the limits of its authority and declare them unconstitutional,” said Paul S. Ryan, Campaign Legal Center Senior Counsel. “Such an outrageous request, filed by campaign finance attorneys as seasoned as those retained by the requestors, would certainly seem to point to plans for protracted litigation.”

The comments strongly urge the FEC to reject the request and to prepare to defend the law in court against an expected challenge by the requestors.

To read the comments, click here.

Today, the Campaign Legal Center joined Democracy 21 and Americans for Campaign Reform in voicing strong objections to changes to the Federal Election Commission’s Enforcement Manual that have been proposed by Commissioners McGahn, Hunter and Petersen. The groups also object to the possibility that these significant changes to the agency’s Enforcement Manual will be made by a partisan majority vote at a time when there is less than a full complement of six Commissioners on the agency, with Republican Commissioners presently outnumbering Democratic Commissioners 3-to-2. Such a vote would be entirely unnecessary in inappropriate, particularly in light of Commissioner nominations presently pending confirmation in the Senate.

The changes would stop the longstanding free exchange of information between FEC professional staff and the Department of Justice, United States Attorneys and other federal agencies, thus hindering enforcement of federal campaign finance laws. Internally, the proposal would remove the ability of the agency’s dedicated professional staff to consider publicly available information in its investigations without a vote of approval from the Commission, effectively giving investigative veto power to the three Republican Commissioners who have repeatedly refused to enforce current campaign finance laws.

“The Commissioners proposing these changes have repeatedly blocked FEC enforcement of the laws on the books. This proposal would further undermine the efforts of the FEC’s professional staff as well as other federal agencies to enforce the nation’s campaign finance laws,” said Legal Center Senior Counsel Paul S. Ryan. “The current Republican Commissioners have gone to unprecedented lengths to stymie effective enforcement of our campaign finance laws. This latest attempt to hamstring campaign finance law enforcement—a parting shot by an outgoing Commissioner serving an expired term—is bad public policy and must be stopped.”

Currently all five sitting commissioners are serving expired terms.

To read the full letter, click here.

Yesterday, Rep. Matt Cartwright introduced H.R. 2670, the Openness in Political Expenditures Now Act (OPEN Act), to address the flood of secret political spending by corporation and unions in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens Uniteddecision. The legislation would require corporations and labor unions to disclose political expenditure details to shareholders or union members. The legislation would also cap the amount of political spending by tax-exempt 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organizations at the lesser of 10% of the organization’s total annual budget or $10,000,000.

“Representative Cartwright’s bill would curb the rapidly-growing abuse of the tax code by de facto political committees posing as 501(c)(4) social welfare groups in order to hide the identities of those seeking to buy influence in Washington,” said Paul S. Ryan, Campaign Legal Center Senior Counsel. “Further, the bill would provide greater disclosure of corporate and union political spending, which the Supreme Court in its Citizens United decision assured us existed, but in fact does not. The American public is fed up with secret money in politics and Congress must address the matter before the next election. The OPEN Act and other laudable bills to address the growing problem need to be part of the discussion as Congress moves to address this festering sore on our democracy.”

To read the full bill, click here.

Late yesterday, the Campaign Legal Center, joined by Democracy 21, filed comments with the Federal Election Commission urging the agency to reject a request by the Democratic Governors Association (DGA) for permission to fund federal election activity with money raised outside federal contribution limits (i.e., “soft money”), which would clearly violate the McCain-Feingold Law soft money ban.

Under the soft money ban, state party committees, as well as any “association or similar group of candidates for State or local office or of individuals holding State or local office” must use funds raised under federal contribution limits to pay for federal election activity—defined in the law to include voter registration, get-out-the-vote (“GOTV”) activities, voter identification and ads that promote, attack, support or oppose federal candidates. The DGA along with Jobs and Opportunity (J&O), an organization under the full control of the DGA, submitted Advisory Opinion Request (AOR) 2013-4 to the FEC asking if they could pay for federal election activity with unlimited soft money.

The Legal Center and Democracy 21 emphasized to the FEC that DGA is an association of state officeholders, so paying for the proposed activities with nonfederal funds would clearly violate the plain language of the statute. The watchdogs reminded the Commission that the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia held in Shays v. FEC that the Commission lacks the authority to create exemptions from the federal election activity soft money restrictions for associations of state candidates and officeholders. Further the comments point out that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the soft money ban in McConnell v. FEC.

“The statute anticipates exactly this type of attempted circumvention of the law and makes it abundantly clear that federal election activity must be funded using money raised under federal contribution limits,” said Paul S. Ryan, Campaign Legal Center Senior Counsel. “This request is a Trojan Horse, but those sending it are clearly seeking willing accomplices inside the walls of the FEC.”

To read the comments filed by the Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21, click here.