For four decades, the government has labored under the dubious belief that you can’t buy one congressman for $2,600, but you can buy lots of them for $2,600 apiece.
No more. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling issued Wednesday, threw out the aggregate limit on how much money an individual donor can give to all the federal candidates he or she wants.
The per-candidate “base limit” — currently $2,600 for the primary and $2,600 for the general election, per election cycle — remains in place. But there’s no longer a limit to how many candidates a donor can fully support.
Here’s an explanation from the decision penned by Chief Justice John Roberts:
“The Government may no more restrict how many candidates or causes a donor may support than it may tell a newspaper how many candidates it may endorse. In its simplest terms, the aggregate limits prohibit an individual from fully contributing to the primary and general election campaigns of ten or more candidates, even if all contributions fall within the base limits.
“And it is no response to say that the individual can simply contribute less than the base limits permit: To require one person to contribute at lower levels because he wants to support more candidates or causes is to penalize that individual for ‘robustly exercis[ing]’ his First Amendment rights.”
The previous aggregate limit was $48,600. The practical effect in a state like Georgia, which has 14 congressional districts, was no donor could support a candidate in every district. The majority of the court rightly deemed this an unjustifiable restriction on free speech.
Why might a donor want to give to a candidate in each of Georgia’s congressional districts? Maybe he owns land or businesses in all 14. Maybe he wants to support candidates who agree on issues of statewide importance, such as the Savannah harbor expansion. Maybe he just likes Democrats, or Republicans.
The reason doesn’t really matter, because here’s the thing about free speech: It isn’t really free if its content or rationale needs the prior approval of others.
And like it or not, as long as most federal campaigns are fought over the airwaves, campaign contributions are a critical form of political speech.
As for the possibility of corruption, should you still subscribe to the group discount theory of campaign-finance law: Quid pro quo corruption remains illegal. The court’s majority found the government had outlined no plausible scenario in which ending aggregate limits would lead to corruption that wasn’t already prohibited by other laws.
In any case, we simply aren’t talking about vast sums of money in the context of modern politics, because the per-candidate limits are still in force.
Our hypothetical donor giving to a candidate in each of Georgia’s congressional districts would still be limited to a total $72,800 per election cycle in those races. For the 2014 elections, there are already 29 congressional candidates in Georgia who have surpassed that total on their own, even without counting loans or money raised in the just-completed first quarter.
If we exclude incumbents, there still are 18 such candidates, who have already raised more than $230,000 apiece on average.
There was money in politics before this ruling, and there’d still be plenty of it had the court gone the other way. If someone tells you we can take the money out of politics, don’t buy it.
