Campaign finance: Free speech vs. corruption

Until now, campaign finance law has limited how much money wealthy Americans can give to individual political candidates, said Adam Liptak in The New York Times.“That may be about to change.” The Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in a major campaign finance case, McCutcheon v. FEC. Alabama businessman Shaun McCutcheon—who is currently federally restricted to donating $2,600 per candidate, with a total limit of $48,600 per election cycle—has asked the court to lift the aggregate cap, so that he can donate $2,600 to as many candidates as he likes. Conservative justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, expressed open sympathy for McCutcheon’s argument that the cap unconstitutionally limits his free speech. “In a world of $10 million checks to Super PACs,” said Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post, such strict restrictions on donations to individual candidates seem quaint. But if the Supreme Court strikes down this limit, would all contribution limits be next?

No law should constrain free speech, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. The campaign finance laws passed during the Watergate era were ostensibly designed to prevent corruption. But there can be no doubt that these laws, including the cap on individual donations, are a form of censorship. The current law presumes that McCutcheon can legally give $2,600 to 18 candidates without corrupting them, but not to a 19th or 20th. The limit is arbitrary and should be removed. The more political speech, the better. “The sheer amount of spending on politics today reduces the influence of any single campaign donor.”

Easy for the rich to say, said Katrina vanden -Heuvel in WashingtonPost.com. Thanks to the court’s infamous Citizens United decision in 2010, which allowed unlimited donations to PACs and other political groups, a small coterie of millionaires and billionaires already have far more influence over elections than regular voters do. Republicans are openly hoping that the court’s conservative wing will use the McCutcheon case to make the game-changing decision to throw out campaign contribution limits altogether. That “would be an astonishingly bold and poor decision,” said Ciara Torres-Spelliscy in NYTimes.com. Remove what’s left of contribution limits, and lobbyists and the superrich would be free to give the kind of sums that “turn a politician’s head.” At that point, Congress would be an even more embarrassing exercise in “quid pro quo corruption.”

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