SCOTUSBlog Arizona Free Enterprise Evening Roundup

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The Chief Justice announced the last opinion of the Term this morning, in Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett (consolidated with McComish v. Bennett). By a vote of five to four, the Court held that Arizona’s matching funds scheme, which provides additional funds to a publicly funded candidate when expenditures by a privately financed candidate and independent groups exceed the funding initially allotted to the publicly financed candidate, substantially burdens political speech and is not sufficiently justified by a compelling interest to survive First Amendment scrutiny. The New York Times has a “Room for Debate” on the decision, featuring posts by election-law specialists.  Coverage  of the decision also appears at  USA Today, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Atlantic and the Atlantic Wire, Bloomberg, the National Review Online, Reuters, the Huffington Post, and the ABA Journal, Devlin Barrett writes for the Wall Street Journal blog Metropolis on how the ruling may affect New York’s campaign finance law.  Early commentary has started to trickle in as well.  Ilya Shapiro weighs in on the decision at Cato@Liberty, arguing that the result should have “been obvious to the entire Court.”  And in an op-ed for the New Republic, Rick Hasen outlines what he characterizes as the good news coming out of the Court’s opinion:  “we may not be seeing the full end of campaign finance law, at least not yet, and Justice Kagan has shown that the other side won’t go down without a fight.”

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