WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court endorsed the key provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law Wednesday, issuing a strong affirmation of Congress’ authority to regulate the flow of money in politics.
Rejecting opponents’ claims that McCain-Feingold stifles free speech, a slender but emphatic five-justice majority upheld both the law’s ban on so-called "soft money" — unregulated donations to the parties from wealthy individuals, corporations and unions — and its new rules limiting campaign-season political advertising.
Both parts of the statute were appropriately designed to combat a widespread and well-founded perception that large donors exercise undue influence over government, the majority ruled.
The law effectively confronts what the court majority’s main opinion, written jointly by Justices John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O’Connor, called "the danger that officeholders will decide issues not on the merits or the desires of their constituencies, but according to the wishes of those who have made large financial contributions valued by the officeholder."
The court’s surprisingly unambiguous reading of a dizzyingly complex statute crowned a movement for campaign finance change that had been energized both by allegations of favoritism by the Clinton White House toward soft-money donors and by the Enron scandal surrounding the current Bush administration. The movement culminated last year in the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act and its signing by President Bush.
Wednesday’s ruling, delivered on an expedited basis after the justices returned early from their summer recess in September to hear oral argument in the case, removed lingering uncertainty about the effect of McCain-Feingold on the pending 2004 presidential election campaign, ensuring that the virtually the entire law will remain in force through next year — and beyond.
Stevens and O’Connor wrote of the need to "plug the soft money loophole" in existing campaign law, of pernicious "sham issue advocacy" paid for by shadowy donors and of the parties’ "peddling" access to federal lawmakers.
In the face of these problems, McCain-Feingold was a "modest" law that would have "only a marginal impact on political speech," the majority ruled.
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