McConnell V. Federal Election Commission - Opinions

Opinions

Justices Breyer, Stevens, O'Connor, Souter, and Ginsburg established the majority for two parts of the Court's opinion:

• With respect to Titles I and II of the BCRA, Justices Stevens, O'Connor wrote the opinion of the Court.
• With respect to Title V of the BCRA, Justice Breyer wrote the Court's opinion.

Because the regulations dealt mostly with soft-money contributions that were used to register voters and increase attendance at the polls, not with campaign expenditures (which are more explicitly a statement of political values and therefore deserve more protection), the Court held that the restriction on free speech was minimal. It then found that the restriction was justified by the government's legitimate interest in preventing "both the actual corruption threatened by large financial contributions and... the appearance of corruption" that might result from those contributions.

In response to challenges that the law was too broad and unnecessarily regulated conduct that had not been shown to cause corruption (such as advertisements paid for by corporations or unions), the Court found that such regulation was necessary to prevent the groups from circumventing the law. Justices O'Connor and Stevens wrote that "money, like water, will always find an outlet" and that the government was therefore justified in taking steps to prevent schemes developed to get around the contribution limits.

The Court also rejected the argument that Congress had exceeded its authority to regulate elections under Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution. The Court found that the law only affected state elections in which federal candidates were involved and also that it did not prevent states from creating separate election laws for state and local elections.

Two dissenting opinions were included in the decision:

• Justice Stevens, joined by Justices Ginsburg, and Breyer, dissented on one section of the part of the Court's opinion written by the Chief Justice.
• The Chief Justice, joined by Justice Kennedy and Scalia, issued a 15-page dissent against the Court's opinion with respect to Titles I and V of the BCRA.

Three other justices wrote separate opinions on the decision:

• Justice Kennedy, joined by the Chief Justice, issued a 68-page dissenting opinion and appendix, noting that BCRA forces "speakers to abandon their own preference for speaking through parties and organizations."
• Justice Thomas issued a separate 25-page dissenting opinion noting that the Court was upholding the "most significant abridgment of the freedoms of speech and association since the Civil War."
• Justice Scalia issued a separate 19-page dissenting opinion, a "few words of own," because of the "extraordinary importance" of the cases.