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Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Law - Supreme Court decision this week carries the potential to undermine campaign finance reform

So writes the NY Times in an editorial today about the Supreme Court's ruling this week in Wisconsin Right to Life v. Federal Election Commission (see ILB entry from 1/23/06). The editorial begins:

Just when the American public - outraged by the growing lobbying scandals - is calling for more regulation of money in politics, the Supreme Court has opened the door for a move in the other direction. Its brief 9-to-0 ruling this week is technical in nature, but carries the potential to undermine campaign finance reform.

The decision involves the McCain-Feingold reform law, which the court upheld in a landmark 2003 ruling. During the 2004 elections, Wisconsin Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, wanted to run television ads that put Senator Russell Feingold, a Democrat who was in a tough re-election fight, in a bad light.

The ads expressed concern about the use of filibusters to block judicial nominees, and urged viewers to tell Senator Feingold, and Wisconsin's other senator, to oppose filibusters. McCain-Feingold bans the use of corporate and special-interest group money for "electioneering communications," which it defines in part as ads that run within 60 days of a general election and mention a candidate by name. But Wisconsin Right to Life argued that its ads were grass-roots lobbying - an attempt to change the process of judicial confirmation - not an electioneering effort to defeat Senator Feingold. Therefore, the group said, the ads did not come under the law's limitations.

The lower court interpreted the Supreme Court's 2003 ruling to mean that all ads of this kind were restricted within the 60-day window, and that lower courts should not get involved in trying to separate acceptable ads from unacceptable ones. But the Supreme Court disagreed this week, saying that courts could hear "as applied" challenges like Wisconsin Right to Life's, and consider which ads were really no more than grass-roots lobbying.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on January 25, 2006 09:01 AM
Posted to General Law Related