That’s where the new case comes in. Current federal law
allows individual donors to give up to two thousand six hundred dollars
to any one candidate during a single election. In addition, they can
give only an aggregate hundred and twenty-three thousand dollars to
candidates, political action committees, and parties over a two-year
period. Shaun McCutcheon, an Alabama Republican, wants to give more
money to the candidates he supports, so he has sued to invalidate the
rules limiting the over-all amounts he can give. (Indeed, the
patriotically minded McCutcheon wanted to give “$1,776” to enough
candidates to exceed the current limits on direct contributions.) The Supreme Court will hear his case in the fall, and he has a good chance of winning.
To see why McCutcheon may win, one must examine the strange reasoning
that governs the Supreme Court’s decisions on campaign finance. In his
brief to the Justices, McCutcheon makes an argument that is breathtaking
for its candor. He says that when Congress first upheld limits on
contributions, in the 1976 case of Buckley v. Valeo,
the limits on aggregate giving served a useful purpose. Without the
ceiling, the Court explained, a person could legally “contribute massive
amounts of money to a particular candidate through the use of
unearmarked contributions to political committees likely to contribute
to that candidate, or [make] huge contributions to the candidate’s
political party.”
But that, McCutcheon points out, was before the days of Citizens
United. Now, he implies, Citizens United has undermined so many of the
old rules that they are kind of irrelevant at this point. Indeed, the
lower-court judge who considered the McCutcheon case upheld the existing
rules but raised the “possibility that Citizens United undermined the
entire contribution limits scheme.”
