The Court denied cert. today in a case in which the D.C. Circuit en banc had unanimously upheld federal law banning direct campaign contributions to candidates by federal contractors. (I had missed that in today’s orders because the name changed from Wagner v. FEC to Miller v. FEC, but Ron Collins at his indispensable FAN at Concurring Opinions noticed it.)  (There’s still a question about whether the ban applies to contractor contributions to super pacs.)

Why did the Court decline to hear the case, despite its general hostility to campaign finance limits? As I explain in Election Law’s Path in the Roberts Court’s First Decade: A Sharp Right Turn But with Speed Bumps and Surprising Twists (draft in progress, Nov. 2015), which I’ll be presenting next month at a Stanford Law Review symposium, “The Roberts Court is fundamentally conservative, but for jurisprudential, temperamental, or strategic reasons Justices holding the balance of power appear to prefer incrementalism to radical change. Mandatory appellate jurisdiction appears the best way to force the Roberts’ Court’s hand, and it often but not always leads to a conservative result.” This contractor case, unlike the upcoming soft money case, did not come up to the Court on mandatory appellate jurisdiction, and so once again the Court took a pass. Watch the soft money case.