To the plaintiff, the lawsuit is over a fundamental matter of freedom. SCOTUS to consider donor limits

Shaun McCutcheon never thought the case that bears his name would make it this far.

But Tuesday, the 46-year-old electrical engineer, conservative activist and donor will watch the Supreme Court hear the case that could erase Watergate-era caps on campaign donations.


McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the lawsuit challenging the total amount of money a single donor can give to all federal candidates could have far-reaching implications for the way campaigns and political parties are financed.

The court’s 2010 Citizens United decision has entered the vernacular as shorthand for the explosion of money in politics. That case, along with another that allowed the creation of super PACs, led to donors writing multimillion-dollar checks. Because of the way modern campaigns are financed — by candidates partnering with federal, state and local parties — McCutcheon’s lawsuit could have the consequence of allowing politicians to ask a single donor for $1 million a pop, or more.

To McCutcheon, the lawsuit is over a fundamental matter of freedom. He argues the government has no right to set overall caps on donations in the first place. To campaign-finance reformers and government watchdogs, it’s a potential nightmare — the latest in a long series of Supreme Court cases that have allowed Big Money to dominate politics.

( McCutcheon Opinion: Donation caps hurt democracy)

“It probably will put more money into politics,” McCutcheon said in a recent interview. That’s part of the invisible hand of the free market, he says — and perhaps an influx of money into the political process could be a potential stimulus for the economy. “What’s wrong with more jobs, more commerce, more competition?”

Though the case deals only with the total donation cap, the court could use the opportunity to undercut — or toss — the laws governing contribution limits to candidates. Or, more likely, it could crack open the door for other challenges that would further roll back the campaign-finance system that has been in place since the early 1970s.

“That could potentially throw a lot of things into question” said Larry Norton, an election-law expert with the law firm Venable and a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission.

Some are asking the court to do just that. In an unusual move, the Supreme Court granted attorneys for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) time to argue before the court that all federal contribution limits should be lifted. “Contribution limits restrict the rights of speech and association of both the contributor and the recipient of the contribution,” McConnell argued in brief filed last spring.

( Also on POLITICO: Report: Dead donors gave $586K)

This wouldn’t be the first time the Supreme Court went beyond the original parameters of a campaign-finance case.

In the Citizens United case, the nonprofit group was asking only a narrow question about whether it was allowed to air a film critical of Hillary Clinton within 30 days of an election. Instead, the court took the opportunity to issue a sweeping ruling that totally reshaped election law by allowing corporations and unions to spend freely on politics, as long as those efforts are independent of candidates and parties.

But the Supreme Court’s willingness to go well beyond what plaintiffs have asked for has campaign-finance reform advocates nervous.

“You can certainly make the case that, from time to time, this court declines the opportunity to set new precedents,” said Nick Nyhart, president and CEO of the watchdog group Public Campaign. “Given the track record of this court, and the way that the Roberts Court has sided with Big Money, it will not be a shock” if the court were to side with McCutcheon in his lawsuit.

( Also on POLITICO: The mega-donor glass ceiling)

But though he’s being feted as a hero in conservative campaign-finance circles, McCutcheon — a Republican activist with a self-described libertarian bent — doesn’t want to gut all of the nation’s campaign-finance laws. Transparency, disclosure and even the federal law that caps individual donations to each candidate at $2,600 are all things he says he supports.

“This case is about aggregate limits, not base limits,” he said. “Base limits make a lot of sense.”

“Obviously, if I gave a single candidate a million dollars, they would feel obligated to do something,” he said.

McCutcheon says the case is less about giving Republicans a partisan advantage and more about helping challengers in races against entrenched incumbents. “I think the case can benefit Democrats, independents and Republicans,” he said. “There’s a lot of money in politics, but the challengers have difficulty raising money.”

Though the case deals only with aggregate contribution limits, campaign-finance watchdogs have warned that — because fundraisers can be done jointly — eliminating the aggregate contribution limit could be a backdoor way for candidates to start soliciting seven-figure checks from a single donor.

Right now, the only thing stopping campaigns from doing this is the aggregate contribution limit. Obama for America was able to raise about $70,000 per donor by partnering with the Democratic National Committee and a handful of state parties. The only thing that kept them from asking for more was the hard aggregate cap set by federal law.

“The aggregate limits certainly severely handicaps the national political parties,” said Jim Bopp, the attorney who helped argue the Citizens United case and who is on the legal team representing McCutcheon. “Once we win the case, I think there will be substantial funds that the national political parties will be able to raise that, right now, would be illegal.”

The case first came about from McCutcheon’s experiences as an activist in Alabama politics. McCutcheon got involved in politics only later in life. He did not grow up in an overtly political family. His father — an electrical engineering professor — usually voted the Democratic ticket, while his mother leaned a bit more toward the GOP.

“I do not come from a political family, and I do not come from a rich family,” McCutcheon said. “I understand that Republican politics is a lot of family business, but I’m not that.”

He was in college during the Reagan years when he took a passing interest in conservative politics. “I liked the mechanics of politics,” McCutcheon said. “It’s like a big game.”

But he was adamant about studying electrical engineering — something that had fascinated him as a youngster growing up with an academic father. He compares politics to the branch of science that studies complicated systems. In fact, “It’s like large-system theory.”

After college, he got involved in electrical engineering in his native Alabama, working for a company called Electric Machine Control for many years. He went into business for himself in 1996, starting his company Coalmont Electrical Development Co. He continued to do work with his former boss until 1999, however. It was then when his boss and business partner was killed in a workplace accident at a steel mill — with McCutcheon on-site.

He was increasingly drawn into Republican politics in the 2000s — and became involved locally in Birmingham, Ala., shortly after President Barack Obama took office in 2009.

McCutcheon met election attorney Dan Backer several times over the years at the Conservative Political Action Conference — an annual gathering of conservative leaders and grass-roots activists in Washington.

After a string of successful victories, Backer and several other activist conservative lawyers had long eyed the aggregate contribution as the next potential target. Meanwhile, McCutcheon — in his role as a donor — county Republican official and conservative activist, found himself irritated by the biannual contribution limit that kept him from giving more through official channels.

When McCutcheon mentioned it to Backer, the attorney encouraged him to file the lawsuit.

“By the way, I was right” Backer told POLITICO, teasing his client for his initial skepticism.