“We used to have a standard fax, which we turned into an email, that would go out in response to solicitations that said something like Mr. O’Brien has hit his maximum or something like that,” says O’Brien, founder of the OB-C Group, a high-profile lobby firm. “The cap did have a real world consequence. Once you hit it, you hit it.”
O’Brien was referring to the limit on a donor’s overall campaign contributions, which stood at $123,200 per election cycle. The Supreme Court, however, obliterated the aggregate cap last April on First Amendment grounds with its McCutcheon v. FEC ruling.
And with that, K Street’s familiar refrain to candidates’ pleas for campaign cash—“I’ve maxed out”—was no longer operative. Campaigns, meanwhile, interpreted McCutcheon as a hall pass for harassing K Street donors.
In this free-fire fundraising environment, O’Brien is now liberated to give more and bother his relatives less.
“I invariably hit the limit every cycle and if I felt the justification to go beyond that, I often sought the help of other family members for making donations on their own,” O’Brien says. “In a sense, I used to see us over the limit anyway.”