Campaign Spending Curbs Debated in High Court

In this election year, the Republican and Democratic parties have found something to agree on.

Both have joined in the Supreme Court to argue that they have a free-speech right to spend money to promote their candidates, regardless of spending limits set by the Federal Election Commission.

And Monday’s hourlong argument suggests a majority of the justices probably agrees.

It is “good old-fashioned democratic politics” for the parties to run radio and television ads boosting their candidates, said Justice Antonin Scalia. “I have never considered it corruption,” he added.

But since the Watergate era of the early 1970s, the government has maintained that pouring too much money into a political race is a form of corruption. The revelations of vast secret expenditures that fueled President Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign prompted Congress to pass limits on money given to and spent by federal candidates. Moreover, campaigns were required to disclose both contributions and spending.

A ruling in the case of Colorado Republicans vs. Federal Election Commission, 95-489, due by July, could free the parties to pour unlimited money into this fall’s contests for the House and Senate.

The case does not deal with the limits on direct contributions and disclosure requirements, so those will remain in place.

Nonetheless, the Colorado case has the potential to unravel the complicated and confusing regulations that govern federal elections.

Twenty years ago, the high court in Buckley vs. Valeo lifted the spending limits for candidates and said that the government cannot restrict how much individuals spend on their own campaigns.

That ruling has created a perverse set of campaign regulations that limits how much candidates and state parties can raise, while allowing fabulously wealthy candidates, such as Texas billionaire Ross Perot and magazine publisher Steve Forbes, to fund unlimited campaigns out of their own pockets.

Ten years ago this spring, Democratic Rep. Timothy E. Wirth was a declared candidate for the Senate, but he had not yet won his party’s nomination. The Colorado GOP ran three radio ads questioning Wirth’s record. He “has voted against every new weapon system in the last five years. And he voted against the balanced-budget amendment,” the ads said.

The FEC counted the $15,000 spent for those ads as an election expenditure, and the amount put the party over its federal spending limit for 1986. The law sets a limit for each state party based on the population of the state, with California having the highest total of $1.4 million.

Rather than simply pay a fine, the Colorado Republicans challenged the spending limit as a violation of the 1st Amendment’s free-speech clause. The U.S. court of appeals in Denver rejected the challenge last year, but the justices agreed to hear the appeal.

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Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist is the only member of the high court who participated in the 1976 ruling. Since then, a new generation of conservative justices has joined the court and argued that campaign spending is a form of classic free speech.

The Democratic National Committee, the Republican National Committee and a group of political scientists known as the Committee for Party Renewal filed briefs supporting the Colorado Republicans.

Common Cause and Public Citizen joined FEC lawyers in arguing that corporate donors could win undue political influence if party spending limits are voided.

Meanwhile, the court also said Monday that it would decide whether California can set a lower wage for certified apprentices on state-funded projects than the prevailing union wage. The case, California vs. Dillingham Construction, 95-789, will be heard in the fall.