Citizens United v. FEC

by Jeremy Leaming

If you thought the U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wing justices were finished tackling the scope and reach of campaign finance law with its 2010 Citizens United v. FEC, you were wrong.

The high court, with its announcement today to review limits on contributions to candidates during two-year election cycles, could be ready to extend even more leeway to the nation’s most powerful to influence elections.

The justices, as The Huffington Post’s Paul Blumenthal reports, agreed to review a case called McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, which will provide the opportunity to overturn the limits. As Blumenthal notes the limits on contributions were upheld in the Court’s Buckley v. Valeo case, but campaign finance regulations took a major hit with the Court’s Citizens United opinion, which gave corporations greater power to spend freely to influence elections.

SCOTUSblog’s Lyle Denniston reports that a more pressing concern than tinkering with limits on campaign donations may be lurking in the background. “Since the Supreme Court’s landmark opinion in 1976 in Buckley v. Valeo, it has always given government more leeway to control contributions to candidates or political organizations than over spending by candidates or by independent political activists.  That differing constitutional treatment potentially is at stake in the new case ….”

Denniston continues, “What is at stake directly is the constitutionality of the two-year ceilings that federal law sets on what an individual can give during a campaign for the presidency or Congress, in donations to candidates, to political parties, or to other political committees.

Democracy 21, a nonpartisan group working to “eliminate undue influence of big money in American politics,” said the outcome of the case could have “enormous consequences for the country."

The group’s president, Fred Wertheimer, in a press statement, said the “aggregate limit on contributions by individuals is necessary to prevent circumvention of the limits on contributions to candidates and political parties and the prohibition on federal officeholders soliciting huge corrupting contributions.”

Wertheimer and the group's counsel, Don Simon, also exmaine in a new ACS Issue Brief the extensive problems with the Federal Election Commission, the agency charged with enforcing the nation's campaign finance laws. The two write that the president has failed to appoint commissioners to the six-member entity and that the FEC is now controlled by members who are "ideologically opposed to the campaign finance laws."

If the high court were to gut or weaken the limit on contributions it would “open the door to $1 million and $2 million dollar contributions from an individual buying corrupting influence with a powerful officeholder soliciting these contributions, and with the political party and federal candidates benefiting from these seven figure contributions.”

by Jeremy Leaming

It’s not where he said it; it’s what Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had to say about the ruling in Citizens United and the role of the federal government that warrants any kind of notice.

Alito has long been defensive of the high court’s handiwork in a decision that gave more power to corporate interests to spend their expenditures on politicking. That 2010 high court opinion in Citizens United v. FEC overturned longstanding court precedent allowing for some regulation of campaign financing by corporations. During the 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama blasted the Court for trampling that precedent and added that it would become a boon for special interests, including foreign ones, and Alito was caught on camera uttering, “Not true.”

Recently the severely conservative judge (he was far right as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit) again sounded a defensive note on Citizens United before the Federalist Society’s 2012 National Lawyers Convention. Alito, as reported by the Associated Press, said all kinds of newspapers and television news and opinion broadcasts, many owned by vast corporate interests, sound off on and provide endorsements of candidates.

“The question is whether speech that goes to the very heart of government should be limited to certain preferred corporations; namely media corporations,” Alito said during a keynote address at the group’s 30th Anniversary Gala Dinner on Nov. 15. “Surely the idea that the First Amendment protects only certain privileged voices should be disturbing to anybody who believes in free speech.”

Beyond defending the opinion, and shooting a few asides at critics of the opinion, Alito sounded what is a frequent Tea Party or rightwing talking point about ever-expanding powers of the federal government, saying that the views advanced by the administration in several cases before the high court revealed a vision of a society dominated by towering federal government.