High Court to Hear Challenge to Limits on Party Spending

Just as both political parties gear up for the 1996 elections, the Supreme Court announced Friday that it would hear a free-speech challenge to the federal election rules that limit spending by state and national parties.

The ruling, due by July, could free the parties to pour vast amounts of money into the 1996 elections.

But the legal challenge does not threaten the other two pillars of the federal election laws, which restrict contributions and require public disclosure.

However, lawyers for the Colorado GOP say that the Constitution does not allow the government to block party officials from promoting their own candidates or attacking the opposition.

“This restriction on a state party . . . strikes at the very heart of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech,” say the Colorado Republicans.

They ran afoul of the Federal Election Commission in 1986 when they paid $15,000 for a radio advertisement that attacked then-Rep. Timothy E. Wirth, a Democrat who planned to run for the U.S. Senate that year. The ad sounded a familiar theme: It questioned whether Wirth really supported a balanced budget since he had voted against the balanced-budget amendment.

The FEC intervened and said that the $15,000 expenditure put the party over its spending limit and in violation of the law.

Based on a formula tied to a state’s population, the law limits what state and national parties can spend “in connection with the general election campaign of candidates for federal office.”

The elaborate set of FEC regulations grew from the Watergate era and the revelations of vast secret expenditures that fueled the 1972 reelection campaign of President Richard Nixon.

Big money could corrupt the election process, Congress said in 1974, and it put strict limits on contributions and expenditures. It also required regular reports on money that was raised and spent.

The Supreme Court struck down the limits on individual spending in 1976, but it did not tamper with the party limits.

Since then, however, the court’s new conservatives, led by Justice Antonin Scalia, have questioned how restrictions on political speech--whether through broadcast ads or mailings--can escape a challenge under the 1st Amendment.

Last year, a U.S. appeals court in Denver upheld the FEC’s action against the Colorado Republicans on the theory that excessive spending by a party creates “the risk of actual corruption or an appearance of corruption.”

A Washington attorney who appealed on behalf of the Republicans called this notion “nonsensical.”

“This has nothing to do with corruption,” said attorney Jan W. Baran. “The parties exist to engage in political expression. What business does the government have in saying how much they can spend to support their own candidates or what they say about their opponents?”

Clinton administration lawyers urged the court to uphold the spending limits but, instead, the justices announced that they would hear the appeal. Arguments in the case (Colorado Republican Campaign Committee vs. FEC, 95-489) will be heard in April.