Republican-appointed justices joined in overturning the so-called aggregate limits. SCOTUS nixes aggregate giving limits

The Supreme Court on Wednesday delivered another blow to already rickety limits on campaign contributions, ruling that caps on the total amount of money an individual can give to political campaigns, PACs and parties are unconstitutional.

In the 5-4 ruling, the court’s Republican-appointed justices joined in overturning the so-called aggregate limits on the grounds that they violated the First Amendment, while the Democratic appointees dissented — insisting that the caps were constitutional as a means to guard against corruption and circumvention of the still-valid limits on donations to individual campaigns and political committees.


The sweeping ruling has the potential to once again reshape the campaign finance landscape — bringing more campaign money back under the control of political parties after four years of record spending by outside groups.

( Read the Supreme Court opinion)

It’s the latest in a series of federal court rulings — most notably the 2010 Citizens United decision — that are loosening up the rules on campaign contributions. Wednesday’s ruling does not, however, strike down the court’s landmark holding in 1976 Buckley v. Valeo that upheld most contribution limits to individual candidates and committees.

No opinion in the closely watched McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission case won a majority, but five justices voted to strike down the aggregate limits.

Chief Justice John Roberts won the backing of Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Samuel Alito for an opinion finding that the aggregate limits did not help prevent corruption — the sole rationale the high court has blessed for limits on political donations.

”This Court has identified only one legitimate governmental interest for restricting campaign finances: preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption,” Roberts wrote. “We have consistently rejected attempts to suppress campaign speech based on other legislative objectives. No matter how desirable it may seem, it is not an acceptable governmental objective to ‘level the playing field,’ or to ‘level electoral opportunities,’ or to ‘equalize the financial resources of candidates …’ The First Amendment prohibits such legislative attempts to ‘fine-tune’ the electoral process, no matter how well intentioned.”

( Also on POLITICO: Boehner hails SCOTUS ruling)

While the Obama administration argued that eliminating the aggregate caps could allow donors to circumvent the caps on donations to individual candidates and committees, which have considerable latitude to transfer funds, Roberts and his three colleagues were not convinced.

“The problem is that [the aggregate caps] do not serve that function in any meaningful way,” Roberts wrote, dismissing that scenario as “far too speculative.”

Roberts discussed various ways in which a donor might try to funnel money through a slew of different PACs or campaigns. He declared all of them impractical because they would require illegally earmarking donations, because the ultimate donation would be massively diluted or because it would be so disconnected from the original donor as to raise little concern about corruption.

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“It is hard to believe that a rational actor would engage in such machinations,” Roberts said.

More likely, Roberts said, is that a donor seeking to back a candidate would make an independent expenditure or give to a so-called Super PAC.

“At least from the donor’s point of view, it strikes us as far more likely that he will want to see his full $500,000 spent on behalf of his favored candidate — even if it must be spent independently — rather than see it diluted to a small fraction so that it can be contributed directly by someone else,” the chief justice wrote. [emphasis original]

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the dissenters, arguing that removing the aggregate caps would allow donors to bundle huge sums and recreate the so-called soft-money era, when it was lawful to make donations of any size to political parties.

The majority decision “creates a loophole that will allow a single individual to contribute millions of dollars to a political party or to a candidate’s campaign,” Breyer wrote. “Taken together with Citizens United … today’s decision eviscerates our Nation’s campaign finance laws, leaving a remnant incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy that those laws were intended to resolve.”

Sharply disagreeing with Roberts’s assertion that few if any people would use the lifting of aggregate limits to try to push large sums to candidates, Breyer wrote at considerable length about the various ways donors and political operatives could use the court’s ruling to route millions of dollars to lawmakers and their challengers.

Breyer also said Roberts went too far in declaring that only a fear of quid pro quo corruption was a legitimate basis for limiting campaign donations.

“The anti-corruption interest that drives Congress to regulate campaign contributions is a far broader, more important interest than the plurality acknowledges. It is an interest in maintaining the integrity of our public governmental institutions. And it is an interest rooted in the Constitution and in the First Amendment itself,” Breyer wrote.

Breyer argued that the interest animating the court’s 2003 decision upholding a ban on soft-money donations to political parties was not rooting out quid pro quo corruption, but limiting “privileged access to and pernicious influence upon elected representatives.”

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Justice Clarence Thomas did not join the Roberts opinion, but wrote a broader one, arguing that all limits on political contributions are unconstitutional and stating he would have overturned the core holding of Buckley.

”What remains of Buckley is a rule without a rationale. Contributions and expenditures are simply ‘two sides of the same First Amendment coin,’ and our efforts to distinguish the two have produced mere ‘wordgames’ rather than any cognizable principle of constitutional law,” Thomas wrote. “This case represents yet another missed opportunity to right the course of our campaign finance jurisprudence by restoring a standard that is faithful to the First Amendment.”

Prior to Wednesday’s ruling, federal law capped the total amount of money that a single donor could give at $48,600 to candidate committees and $74,600 in contributions to PACs and party committees in each two-year cycle. That limit is separate from the $2,600 limit on donations to a single candidate per election and the $32,400 cap on donations to parties, which the ruling did not change.

The court’s majority found in favor of the Republican National Committee and Shaun McCutcheon — a business owner and conservative activist from Alabama — who jointly challenged as an unconstitutional restriction on freedom of speech the federal cap on the total amount of money he was permitted to donate to all federal candidates.

McCutcheon praised the decision Wednesday as an incentive for ordinary Americans to get more involved in politics.

“I think it helps average Americans a great deal,” he said in an interview. “The reason why is, this has to do with individual people making donations to campaigns. And individual people are the people who need to be supporting campaigns. When you talk about more money in politics, the key is more money coming from individual people.”

However, supporters of campaign finance limits were quick to decry the ruling.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), co-author of a 2002 ban on soft-money contributions, said he “wasn’t surprised” by the latest Supreme Court ruling, but warned that it would have negative long-term repercussions.

“There will be scandals because of this, I guarantee it,” McCain warned.

It’s the biggest campaign finance decision since Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, where the court concluded that corporations, nonprofits and unions were free to make unlimited political expenditures — so long as they were not coordinated with candidates or campaigns.

That decision had far-reaching implications for the way campaigns and political parties are financed.

An RNC official in February told reporters in January that the lifting of the cap would help bring more money to the party committees — and was good for the system as a whole.

“Right now, you’re choosing between the three committees when you give,” the official said, noting that the $74,600 cap keeps donors from giving the maximum — now set at $32,400 — to all three party committees.

And, the RNC noted that money to the party committees was fully disclosed.

“It’s not just more money into the system. It’s more money that’s transparent, it’s more money that’s tracked. It actually gets more transparent and actually allows more to go in ways that can be seen,” the official said, speaking at a background briefing for reporters.

Since the 2010 Citizens United case, parties have seen many of their functions outsourced to outside groups, who are able to raise more money from big donors.

Karl Rove’s Crossroads network — consisting of a super PAC and a tax-exempt nonprofit — spent more than $300 million in the 2012 cycle. That sum spent by Crossroads is more than the Republican National Committee raised and spent during the same time period.

And even President Barack Obama — who famously blasted the Citizens United ruling in his 2010 State of the Union address with several Supreme Court justices watching — was boosted by liberal super PACs and nonprofit groups run by his supporters.

McCutcheon could help reverse the trend away from parties by giving them new fundraising tools to help tip the balance away from unlimited spending outside groups.

Because fundraising can be done jointly, the national party committees could — in theory — combine forces with other state parties to solicit checks of $1 million or more.

Such a fundraising plan would allow a presidential candidate, speaker of the House, Senate leader or other top official to attend a fundraiser legally soliciting a six- or seven-figure check.

Prior to McCutcheon, only outside groups — like Crossroads or the pro-Obama nonprofit Organizing for Action — could hold fundraisers soliciting that amount of cash. Candidates could appear at those fundraisers for outside groups but were not permitted to explicitly ask for cash.

Jake Sherman and Andrea Drusch contributed to this report.

CORRECTION: Prior to Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling, the maximum amount donors could give to committees was $74,600. An earlier version of this story misstated that amount.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: Adam Sneed @ 04/03/2014 01:40 PM CORRECTION: Prior to Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling, the maximum amount donors could give to committees was $74,600. An earlier version of this story misstated that amount.