Supreme Court Overturns Millionaires’ Amendment
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The Supreme Court has been busy this week. One of the decisions they released was an overturn of the ‘Millionaires’ Amendment’ — a piece of campaign legislation law stating that the opponents of candidates self-financing their runs can accept more donations.
Jack Davis, a 2006 congressional candidate in New York, brought the suit to the Supreme Court, after he lost the race. Davis had spent over $2 million of his own funds to finance his run, but the Millionaires’ Amendment kicked in and his opponent was able to out-fundraise him. The amendment was originally written in order to help less wealthy candidates get fair footing — the idea was to prevent millionaires from outspending other candidates and essentially buying a race.
The Supreme Court overturned the amendment on First Amendment grounds: Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote a majority opinion stating, “The argument that a candidate’s speech may be restricted in order to ‘level electoral opportunities’ has ominous implications because it would permit Congress to arrogate the voters’ authority to evaluate the strengths of candidates competing for office.”
Don’t think that too many candidates are going to be able to pull out their checkbooks and win, though. We saw a pretty good example of how well that doesn’t work in the Republican primary with Mitt Romney spending tens of millions of dollars of his own money.
Tags: campaign-finance, supreme-courtRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Political Campaigning
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