Courtesy of Mish.
In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people and in 2012 upheld that ruling. Those actions unleashed a flood of corporation and union-sponsored fundraising activities.
Today the Supreme Court Voided Caps on Total Campaign Giving by individuals.
A divided U.S. Supreme Court struck down decades-old limits on the total money donors can give to federal candidates and parties, issuing its biggest campaign-finance ruling since the 2010 Citizens United decision.
Voting 5-4 along ideological lines, the court today said the caps violated the speech rights of Shaun McCutcheon, an Alabama Republican official seeking to give candidates, parties and political committees more than the $123,200 maximum.
The court stopped short of undercutting a 1976 ruling that allows caps on contributions to individual candidates. For instance, donors will still be limited to giving $2,600 to a federal candidate for each election.
The loosening of campaign-finance restrictions has become a hallmark of the court under Roberts. The Citizens United ruling helped fuel an explosion of campaign spending, with spending from candidates, parties and outside groups topping $6 billion in 2012. Today’s ruling may affect November’s congressional elections, as Republicans seek to take control of the Senate.
Though today’s ruling isn’t likely to approach the effect of Citizens United, it will give more freedom to wealthy donors looking to use their money to make a political impact.
‘Eviscerates’ Laws
Taken together with Citizens United, the 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,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in dissent.
Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia joined Roberts in the majority, with Thomas saying in a separate opinion that he would have gone further and overturned the 1976 ruling. Justices Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented alongside Breyer.
The aggregate limits included a cap of $48,600 to federal candidates and $74,600 to political parties and political action committees during each two-year election cycle.
Those restrictions, which date to 1974, were designed to supplement better-known restraints known as base limits. Under those, donors can contribute a maximum of $2,600 to particular candidates per election, $5,000 per year to individual PACs and $32,400 per year to each national party committee. The limits are indexed for inflation and increase every election cycle….
