|
ection Commission, E. Feigenbaum & J. Palmer, Campaign Finance Law 98 (1998), we granted certiorari to review the congruence of the Eighth Circuit’s decision with Buckley... We reverse.
II
The matters raised in Buckley v. Valeo, included claims that federal campaign finance legislation infringed speech and association guarantees of the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth. The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 ... limited (and still limits) contributions by individuals to any single candidate for federal office to $1,000 per election. ... Until Buckley struck it down, the law also placed a $1,000 annual ceiling on independent expenditures linked to specific candidates. ...We found violations of the First Amendment in the expenditure regulations, but held the contribution restrictions constitutional. ...
A
We then, however, drew a line between expenditures and contributions, treating expenditure restrictions as direct restraints on speech, 424 U.S., at 19, which nonetheless suffered little direct effect from contribution limits...
We flagged a similar difference between expenditure and contribution limitations in their impacts on the association right. While an expenditure limit “precludes most associations from effectively amplifying the voice of their adherents,”...(thus interfering with the freedom of the adherents as well as the association.), the contribution limits “leave the contributor free to become a member of any political association and to assist personally in the association’s efforts on behalf of candidates,”... While we did not then say in so many words that different standards might govern expenditure and contribution limits affecting associational rights, we have since then said so explicitly in Federal Election Comm’n v. Massachusetts Citizens for Life, Inc., ...Thus, under Buckley’s standard of scrutiny, a contribution limit involving “significant interference” with associational rights, ...could survive if the Government demonstrated that contribution regulation was “closely drawn” to match a “sufficiently important interest,”... though the dollar amount of the limit need not be “fine tun[ed],...
In speaking of “improper influence” and “opportunities for abuse” in addition to “quid pro quo arrangements,” we recognized a concern not confined to bribery of public officials, but extending to the broader threat from politicians too compliant with the wishes of large contributors. These were the obvious points behind our recognition that the Congress could constitutionally address the power of money “to influence governmental action” in ways less “blatant and specific” than bribery. ...
B
In defending its own statute, Missouri espouses those same interests of preventing corruption and the appearance of it that flows from munificent campaign contributions. Even without the authority of Buckley, there would be no serious question about the legitimacy of the interests claimed, which, after all, underlie bribery and anti-gratuity statutes. While neither law nor morals equate all political contributions, without more, with bribes, we spoke in Buckley of the perception of corruption “inherent in a regime of large individual financial contributions” to candidates for public office, id., at 27, as a source of concern “almost equal” to quid pro quo improbity,... The public interest in countering that perception was, indeed, the entire answer to the overbreadth claim raised in the Buckley case... at 30. This made perfect sense. Leave the perception of impropriety unanswered, and the cynical assumption that large donors call the tune could jeopardize the willingness of voters to take part in democratic governance. Democracy works “only if the people have faith in those who govern, and that faith is bound to be shattered when high officials and their appointees engage in activities which arouse suspicions of malfeasance and corruption.” ...
Although respondents neither challenge the legitimacy of these objectives nor call for any reconsideration of Buckley, they take the State to task, as the Court of Appeals did, for failing to justify the invocation of those interests with empirical evidence of actually corrupt practices or of a perception among Missouri voters that unrestricted contributions must have been exerting a covertly corrosive influence. The state statute is not void, however, for want of evidence. ...
Buckley demonstrates that the dangers of large, corrupt contributions and the suspicion that large contributions are corrupt are neither novel nor implausible. The opinion noted that “the deeply disturbing examples surfacing after the 1972 election demonstrate that the problem [of corruption] is not an illusory one.” ...
There might, of course, be need for a more extensive evidentiary documentation if petitioners had made any showing of their own to cast doubt on the apparent implications of Buckley’s evidence and the record here, but the closest respondents come to challenging these conclusions is their invocation of academic studies said to indicate that large contributions to public officials or candidates do not actually result in changes in candidates’ positions. Brief for Respondents Shrink Missouri Government PAC et al. 41; Smith, Money Talks: Speech, Corruption, Equality, and Campaign Finance, 86 Geo. L. J. 45, 58 (1997); Smith, Faulty Assumptions and Undemocratic Consequences of Campaign Finance Reform, 105 Yale L. J. 1049, 1067—1068 (1995). Other studies, however, point the other way. Reply Brief for Respondent Bray 4—5; F. Sorauf, Inside Campaign Finance 169 (1992); Hall & Wayman, Buying Time: Moneyed Interests and the Mobilization of Bias in Congressional Committees, 84 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 797 (1990); D. Magleby & C. Nelson, The Money Chase 78 (1990). Given the conflict among these publications, and the absence of any reason to think that public perception has been influenced by the studies cited by respondents, there is little reason to doubt that sometimes large contributions will work actual corruption of our political system, and no reason to question the existence of a corresponding suspicion among voters. ...
C
In Buckley, we specifically rejected the contention that $1,000, or any other amount, was a constitutional minimum below which legislatures could not regulate. As indicated above, we referred instead to the outer limits of contribution regulation by asking whether there was any showing that the limits were so low as to impede the ability of candidates to “amas[s] the resources necessary for effective advocacy,”... We asked, in other words, whether the contribution limitation was so radical in effect as to render political association ineffective, drive the sound of a candidate’s voice below the level of notice, and render contributions pointless. Such being the test, the issue in later cases cannot be truncated to a narrow question about the power of the dollar, but must go to the power to mount a campaign with all the dollars likely to be forthcoming. As Judge Gibson put it, the dictates of the First Amendment are not mere functions of the Consumer Price Index. ...
|
