Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1997
Abstract
Last term, In Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court considered a direct attack on the constitutionality of the Federal Election Campaign Act's ("FECA") limits on political party expenditures. Colorado Republican was the Court's first campaign finance case in six years and the first in which the four Justices appointed by Presidents Bush and Clinton had an opportunity to participate. Colorado Republican was also the first case in the twenty-year regime of Buckley v. Valeo concerned with the constitutionality of restrictions on parties. Coming at a time of rising public concern, increased legislative activity, and continued academic ferment over campaign finance, Colorado Republican offered the promise of clarifying the current Court's approach to campaign finance regulation, marking out the contours of the rights of parties in the campaign finance context, and assessing the implications of judicial doctrine for potential legislative changes.
The Court, however, failed to resolve the central issue in the case. Instead, it fragmented into four opinions, none of which commanded the votes of more than three Justices. A seven-member majority rejected the effort of the Federal Elections Commission ("FEC") to enforce FECA in the case before it, but the three Justices who joined the pivotal opinion authored by Justice Breyer limited their views – and, thus, the holding of the Court – to the facts of the case and declined to reach the broader issue of the constitutionality of limits on party involvement in campaign finance. The six Justices who did reach the issue were sharply divided. Moreover, one Justice directly, and two others implicitly, challenged Buckley v. Valeo's basic approach to campaign finance regulation – although their different opinions embraced decidedly different perspectives.
Colorado Republican illustrates nicely the conceptual difficulties built into the Court's campaign finance doctrine. Buckley's central concerns have proven difficult to apply in practice or justify in theory, and the Court has vacillated with respect to the degree of deference to be given to the judgment of the political branches concerning whether campaign practices present dangers that may be the basis for regulation.
Disciplines
Constitutional Law | Law | Law and Politics
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Richard Briffault,
Campaign Finance, the Parties and the Court: A Comment on Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee v. Federal Elections Commission,
14
Const. Comment.
91
(1997).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/928