High Court rejects Vt. campaign restrictions

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court yesterday struck down a Vermont election law that imposed sweeping restrictions on campaign contributions and expenditures, reopening the debate over whether campaign money should be protected as free speech.

Delivering a 6-to-3 decision in one of the most closely-watched cases of the year, the court held that Vermont's campaign finance rules for state elections violated the First Amendment. The ruling wiped out a 1997 Vermont law that had capped the total amount any candidate could spend during a campaign, while imposing the lowest limits on political donations in the country.

Supporters of the law argued that it would reduce influence-peddling and cut the importance of campaign fund-raising. Vermont's limits on donations ranged from $200 per person for a state legislative race to $400 for the governor's race.

Its spending limit, which was challenged in court when it became law and never went into effect, was set on a sliding scale, from $2,000 for a state representative's race to $300,000 for a gubernatorial campaign.

Writing for the plurality, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that Vermont's contribution limits, the lowest in the country, raised ``danger signs" that could undermine electoral fairness by ``preventing challengers from mounting effective campaigns against incumbent officeholders, thereby reducing democratic accountability."

Yesterday's ruling also means that the government cannot prevent wealthy candidates from spending as much of their own money as they want in their campaign. In 1976, the court struck down spending limits, but advocates who want to rein in campaign spending had hoped the court would use the Vermont case to reverse that ruling.

The decision also means that the government can still limit individual campaign donations, but it can't set those limits too low.

Though the ruling could affect campaign finance laws across the country, it will have an immediate effect on Vermont -- which has been transformed from the state with the most restrictive campaign finance rules in the country to one that apparently has no limits on contributions to candidates -- unless it can pass a law before elections in November.

``At this point, we are a state without a law," Cheryl Hanna , a Vermont Law School professor, said in an interview. ``There is nothing legally that would prohibit any state candidate from raising as much as he or she wanted from an individual contributor. Someone could write a check for a million bucks and hand it to our governor, and he could spend it."

Vermont's attorney general, William Sorrell , the named defendant in the case, said in an interview that his office was researching whether state law would default to a previous law setting campaign contribution limits at $2,000, but that ``certainly strong arguments can be made" that contributions to state campaigns are now wide open.

Public interest groups called the decision a blow to their goal of reducing the importance of campaign-fund-raising. Pat Burns, executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, a leader in the push to make Vermont's election law a reality, called the decision ``incredibly disappointing."

``Instead of allowing us to level the playing field, the justices have pushed average folks to the sidelines and preserved a clear path to power for wealthy donors," Burns said in a statement. ``This ruling undermines Vermont citizens and all Americans who are working to protect the integrity of their democracy and participate equally in the political process."

But opponents of campaign finance limits hailed yesterday's ruling as a victory for free speech and for challengers who face an uphill battle to unseat better-known incumbents. In an interview, Roger Pilon , vice president for legal affairs at the libertarian Cato Institute, said he was ``delighted" by the decision.

``Incumbents already start with a huge advantage over challengers, from name recognition to political networks to media access," Pilon said. ``To restrict [spending by] challengers in the name of fighting corruption utterly ignores the reality on the ground. It's no accident that the reelection rates in the House of Representatives are far higher than they were in the old Soviet Politburo."

While the ruling appeared likely to disrupt the current Vermont election cycle, it represented stability in the larger world of campaign financing. It essentially reaffirmed the status quo elsewhere, upholding the court's position in Buckley v. Valeo , a landmark 1976 case. In that case, the Supreme Court decided that caps on individual campaign contributions are constitutional. But it also ruled that limiting the total expenditures of a candidate goes too far, infringing on political speech.

Both sides of the campaign finance debate have long criticized the Buckley case, though each side wants different parts of the ruling overturned.

Libertarians want the court to scrap any limits on individual campaign contributions, while public interest groups want the court to uphold caps on total campaign spending.

In a sign that the court itself is torn over campaign finance law, yesterday's 6-to-3 result was splintered into six separate opinions.

The main opinion, written by Breyer, struck down the Vermont law largely on the grounds that the 1976 decision was settled precedent, and there was no need to revisit its central holdings.

Breyer was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, and, in separate opinions, by Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy.

However, some of the conservatives justices wanted to go further and to strike down all limits on individual contributions. In a concurring opinion, Scalia and Thomas wrote that all contribution limits are unconstitutional. Kennedy and Alito, in separate concurring opinions, also left the door open to striking down contribution limits in a future case.

The three dissenting justices produced two opinions. Justice David Souter, joined by Justices Ruther Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens, would have given Vermont more leeway in deciding how low to set its contribution limits. And in a separate opinion, Stevens said that he believes expenditure caps are constitutional.

The case was the first major campaign finance decision since 2003, when the court voted 5 to 4 to uphold the federal campaign finance restrictions known as the McCain-Feingold law.