Legal Center President Joins with Other Elections Officials in Brief Supporting Montana’s Corporate Expenditure Restriction
On Friday, Campaign Legal Center President Trevor Potter joined with a number of former federal, state and local election officials in filing an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Montana’s ban on corporate expenditures in elections, which is being challenged in American Tradition Partnership v. Bullock.
The brief urges the Court to deny the petition for certiorari, or if it grants the petition, to reconsider its holding in Citizens United v. FEC that independent expenditures do not result in corruption or the appearance of corruption.
“The political reality that has emerged since the Citizens United decision leaves no doubt that independent expenditures can and do lead to corruption or at the very least the appearance of corruption,” said Trevor Potter, President of the Campaign Legal Center. “One need look no further than the rise of candidate-specific Super PACs to see that the Court’s decision has seriously weakened candidate contribution limits. These entities, run by close allies of candidates and endorsed by the candidates themselves, are running shadow campaigns funded by multi-million dollar contributions thousands of times the $2,500 legal limit for campaign contributions.”
In the filing, Potter is joined by fellow former Federal Election Commission (FEC) Chairman Frank Reiche, two former FEC General Counsels, Larry Noble and Charles Steele, former Director and General Counsel of the Connecticut Elections Enforcement Commission, Jeffrey Garfield, former Executive Director of the New York City Campaign Finance Board, Nicole Gordon, and former General Counsel of the California Fair Political Practices Commission, Robert Stern.
The former election officials are represented in this case by former U.S. Solicitor General Seth Waxman of WilmerHale, Scott Nelson of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, Fred Wertheimer and Donald Simon of Democracy 21 and other attorneys from WilmerHale.
To read the brief filed by Trevor Potter and other elections officials, click here.
To read the Campaign Legal Center brief, click here.
To read other briefs in the case, click here.