Shaun McCutcheon, an Alabama businessman, is the plaintiff in McCutcheon v. FEC. This article is adapted with permission from Outsider Inside the Supreme Court, his forthcoming book on the case.

I have been repairing things since I was a kid. When I was in high school, I fixed many motorcycles, electronics and cars. My next-door neighbor was a man named Honest John. He was a used-car dealer in downtown Birmingham. I was low-cost help for him. And I got the work done. Since then, I have been getting things done in workshops and production operations all over the United States and around the world. Now I’m an electrical engineer, and I run a successful small business near Birmingham, Alabama.

That engineer’s mindset has guided my political activity, including the decision to take my First Amendment challenge to the Supreme Court. It all began during the 2011-12 election cycle, when I was donating money to various candidates for federal office and to some political party committees. To my surprise, one of the party committees informed me that I was nearing the limit of how much I could give to them or to anybody else.


I had never heard of such limits. Somebody—I don’t remember who—showed me a chart on the federal rules of campaign giving that was so complicated I could barely make any sense of it. On the advice of their lawyers, most people simply comply with these rules and don’t raise questions. As an American engineer in the land of the free, I wanted to understand just exactly why my First Amendment rights were being limited.

I decided I needed to fix it. So I filed a lawsuit, which was argued before the United States Supreme Court on Oct. 8, 2013. And on Wednesday, the court agreed with me: Federal campaign contribution aggregate limits were indeed restricting my constitutional right to free speech. “There is no right in our democracy more basic,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “than the right to participate in electing our political leaders.”

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Today I’m thrilled. Back in October, though, I admit I was a little nervous at first. In the court chamber that morning, I was also amazed and proud that this moment had finally arrived. It felt like a thousand-pound weight had been lifted from my shoulders. With the help of the Republican National Committee, my legal team and I had spent months getting ready. In the final weeks, I met regularly with the lawyers as they prepared their arguments and spoke with dozens of news reporters to explain my case in my own words.

Initially, I didn’t know what to expect, since it was my first visit to the Supreme Court. But I grew more confident as I watched the justices respond to our arguments.

We urged them to put the First Amendment first. One of our lawyers, Erin Murphy, framed the issue this way: “By prohibiting contributions that are within the modest base limits Congress has already imposed to combat the reality or appearance of corruption,” she said. “These limits simply seek to prevent individuals from engaging in too much First Amendment activity.”

The justices apparently agreed. Once a citizen has made sufficient contributions to reach the total limitation set by federal law, Chief Justice John Roberts said, “you are telling him that he can’t make that contribution, however modest, certainly within the limits Congress has said does not present the problem of corruption, to a tenth candidate.” That result has a “First Amendment cost,” he concluded. “It seems to me a very direct restriction on much smaller contributions that Congress said do not present a problem with corruption.”

One thing I didn’t anticipate was just how fun the hour-long hearing of our case was. It was serious humor, of course. But I did laugh when Justice Scalia said the existing legal complexities, while they “sap the vitality of the political parties,” also encourage “drive-by PACs for each election”—referring to the mostly unregulated and unaccountable private groups in both parties that have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars, especially in presidential elections.

The worst comment came from Donald Verrilli, who as solicitor general represented the executive branch in defending the law. The First Amendment, he said, was not designed to protect a citizen’s right to give a fancy Maserati to the secretary of defense. Justice Samuel Alito responded that such a donation would be illegal. “We’re talking here about campaign contributions,” he lectured Verrilli.

The Obama administration did not confine its comments on the case that day to the judicial forum. To our surprise, President Obama offered his view in response to a question at a White House press conference. In effect, he seemed to say, we should not be free to communicate ideas. “Essentially [this case] would say anything goes: There are no rules in terms of how to finance campaigns,” the president said. “There aren’t a lot of functioning democracies around the world that function this way, where you can basically have millionaires and billionaires bankrolling whoever they want, however they want, in some cases undisclosed.”

Verrilli had delivered a similar diatribe against wealthy contributors. If our side prevailed in the case, he told the court, “Less than 500 people can fund the whole shooting match [referring to all congressional campaigns]. The public will perceive that the government is being run of, by, and for those 500 people.”

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In the end, the court didn’t buy that argument—and neither should you.

Our political system disadvantages individual people who want to participate. Instead, a series of regulations and court decisions—many of which have been sought by companies, unions and non-profit groups that spend huge amounts of money on politics—have increased their influence. It is time to for individual people to get back into the game. That’s always been my goal.

My Supreme Court case wasn’t about throwing out sensible limits on money in politics. It was narrowly focused on the “aggregate limits” for contributions under the federal election campaign law—the maximum amount that anybody can give to a number of candidates and national party committees combined. The case was not about base limits: $2,600 (for either a primary or general election) or $5,200 (for a primary and general election combined) to a single candidate in a two-year election cycle, or the separate amounts of $32,400 to a party committee or $5,000 to some PACs and $10,000 to state parties. Congress and the courts have determined that these limits are so low that they don’t pose any risk of corrupting candidates or our political system.

It was the aggregate limits on giving to the candidates and committees that made no sense to me. The consequences of these rules were absurd. I could give the legal amount of $2,600 to 17 different candidates. But if I give that same legal amount to an 18thcandidate, it constitutes a violation that somehow corrupts the system.

Only politicians in Washington could come up with such foolishness. And they did just that in 2002 when they passed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. This law, in turn, was based on the series of laws enacted in the 1970s known as the Federal Election Campaign Act. Most sensible Americans understand that, if $2,600 contributions to 17 individual candidates don’t corrupt any of them, then it can’t possibly corrupt an 18th candidate, or a 28th, or 38th…

These limits, which made it harder for insurgent candidates to raise money, also gave incumbents an unfair advantage. And in fact, wanting to support several challengers who share my conservative values was one of my main motivations in taking on this case. I’m no radical: I accept that a base limit on the amount that can be given to any one individual candidate makes sense. Still, if Congress is going to spend and waste most of your money, you should be able to donate to as many candidates as you want. The idea that people who want to get involved are prevented from having the same free-speech rights as big unions or big corporations is just ridiculous.

I admit, my approach to politics is unusual. I’m an engineer. The stylized rhetoric of courtrooms and the halls of Congress—in “functioning democracies,” as President Obama put it—are very different from my professional world. We technical folk tend to be socially introverted and sometimes eccentric. But we tend to think logically. We take complicated problems and seek the simplest solutions possible. Unlike politicians, who sometimes permit problems to linger for years, we try to fix things quickly.

And that’s what I did in this case: I saw a problem with American democracy, and I tried to solve it. With more freely donated private individual money in politics—with more free speech—we can do much better. And thanks to the Supreme Court, we will.