Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2016
Abstract
In McCutcheon v. FEC, Chief Justice Roberts described campaign contributions as a form of participation in electoral politics. His plurality opinion invalidating aggregate limits on contributions to federal candidates concluded that “[c]onstituents have the right to support candidates who share their views and concerns” and that representatives’ responsiveness to such concerns “is key to the very concept of self-governance through elected officials.” As commentators quickly noticed, there was something curious about this paean to democratic representation: the “constituents” the Chief Justice described were not eligible to vote for most of the candidates they were funding. They were not, in other words, constituents in the usual sense. Was this a mere “oops”? A deliberate, if subtle, move to reshape campaign finance law? Something else?
Disciplines
Constitutional Law | Election Law | Law
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Jessica Bulman-Pozen, A Right to Participate in the Electoral Process, JOTWELL (April 29, 2016) (reviewing Robert Yablon, "Voting, Spending, and the Right to Participate," available at SSRN), https://conlaw.jotwell.com/a-right-to-participate-in-the-electoral-process/.