You can find the unanimous opinion of the three-judge panel here. A snippet of the opinion striking down a portion of the “coordinated contributions” standard:
- The question, then, is this: Does the challenged regulation frustrate Congress’s goal of “prohibiting soft
money from being used in connection with federal elections”? McConnell, 540 U.S. at 177 n.69. We think it does. Outside the 90/120-day windows, the regulation allows candidates to evade–almost completely–BCRA’s restrictions on the use of soft money. As FEC counsel conceded at oral argument, Oral Arg. at 0:46-2:00, the regulation still permits exactly what we worried about in Shays II, i.e., more than 90/120 days before an election, candidates may ask wealthy supporters to fund ads on their behalf, so long as those ads contain no magic words. 414 F.3d at 98. Indeed, pressed at oral argument, counsel admitted that the FEC would do nothing about such coordination, even if a contract formalizing the coordination and specifying that it was “for the purpose of influencing a federal election” appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Oral Arg. at 7:34-8:03. Thus, the FEC’s rule not only makes it eminently possible for soft money to be “used in connection with federal elections,” McConnell, 540 U.S. at 177 n.69, but it also provides a clear roadmap for doing so, directly frustrating BCRA’s purpose.
Moreover, by allowing soft money a continuing role in the form of coordinated expenditures, the FEC’s proposed rule
would lead to the exact perception and possibility of corruption Congress sought to stamp out in BCRA, for “expenditures made after a ‘wink or nod’ often will be ‘as useful to the candidate as cash,'” id. at 221 (quoting FEC v. 20 Colo. Republican Fed. Campaign Comm., 533 U.S. 431, 442, 446 (2001)), and “[i]t is not only plausible, but likely, that candidates would feel grateful for such donations and that donors would seek to exploit that gratitude,” id. at 145.