A Worrisome Run to Get the Supreme Court to Overturn the Ban on Corporate Campaign Contributions to Candidates, This One from a Leading Supreme Court Litigator Involving the Father of a Former Ky Democratic Secretary of State

The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the ban on corporate contribution limits in the 2003 case, FEC v. Beaumont. And in Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court noted that there is still a risk of corruption when contributions are made between family members. And the Court has at least 3 times turned down cert. petitions seeking to get the Supreme Court to overturn the ban on corporate contributions in light of opinions written after Beaumont as the Court has become more hostile to campaign finance regulation.

But this cert petition is sure to get the Justices’ attention and could well merit a cert grant, and the case could pave the way to overturning that corporate ban. (h/t John Doe)

First, the petition comes from leading Supreme Court litigator Kannon Shanmugam. That alone will get the petition a close look. Second, it involves a criminal prosecution against a leading Kentucky Democrat, the father of former Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes. And it adopts the same camel’s nose-in-the-tent approach of the Citizens United and Bluman case: it presents a specific set of sympathetic facts (here, the corporation is closely held, and the money went from the corporation controlled by the father to the candidate daughter) to make a much larger hole in campaign finance laws (to blow up the contribution limits applicable to corporations generally). This is catnip for some of the more anti-regulatory Justices.

Let me be clear: even though much of Beaumont‘s reasoning has been undermined by Citizens United (particularly its writings about antidistortion and corporate speech being less valuable), its key insight that the corporate ban is necessary to prevent circumvention of contribution limits remains. People would set up entities specifically to evade contribution limits if it were possible to do so. And it’s not a fanciful hypotehtical, any more than it was fanciful to see the creation of joint fundraising committees after the Court blew up the aggregate contribution limits in McCutcheon.

Watch this case.

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