Supreme Court Eliminates Political Giving Limits

The SCOTUS eliminated giving limits for donors during a single election season.
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In a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court of the United States voted Wednesday, April 2, 2014, to eliminate giving limits for donations during a single election season. The decision will not affect the current $5,200 limit on how much one person can give to any single candidate during a two-year election cycle, but does eliminate the previous overall limit of $123,200 per cycle.

The controversial decision is a win for wealthy donors—conservative or liberal—because they no longer have to scale back overall giving. Proponents for the elimination of the limit claimed that the Federal Election Campaign Act’s limit violated individuals’ First Amendment rights.

The split court decided in their favor: “We conclude that the aggregate limits on contributions do not further the only governmental interest in this court accepted as legitimate [in a 1976 ruling]… They instead intrude without justification on a citizen’s ability to express the most fundamental First Amendment activities,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in representation of the SCOTUS’s conservative majority.

The dissenting half of the court worry that eliminating the limit is a decision that leaves “huge loopholes in the law; and that undermines, perhaps devastates, what remains of campaign finance reform.”

One thing the decision does ensure is that political candidates must have wealthy donors to back them—which has been true for a long time. With the limit eliminated, influence could become even more of a privilege of the rich than it already is, though the individual candidate cap remaining intact should help with that.