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MCCUTCHEON v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMM’N 

Syllabus 

base limits appropriately served the Government’s anticorruption in-
terest,  the  District  Court  concluded  that  the  aggregate  limits  sur-
vived  First  Amendment  scrutiny  because  they  prevented  evasion  of
the base limits. 

Held: The judgment is reversed, and the case is remanded. 

893 F. Supp. 2d 133, reversed and remanded. 

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS, joined by JUSTICE SCALIA, JUSTICE KENNE-
DY, and JUSTICE ALITO, concluded that the aggregate limits are inva-
lid under the First Amendment.  Pp. 7–40.

(a) Appellants’  substantial  First  Amendment  challenge  to  the  cur-
rent system of aggregate limits merits plenary consideration.  Pp. 7– 
14.

(1) In  Buckley,  this  Court  evaluated  the  constitutionality  of  the 
original  contribution  and  expenditure  limits  in  FECA.    Buckley  dis-
tinguished the two types of limits based on the degree to which each 
encroaches  upon  protected  First  Amendment  interests.    It  subjected 
expenditure limits to “the exacting scrutiny applicable to limitations
on core First Amendment rights of political expression.”  424 U. S., at 
44–45.    But  it  concluded  that  contribution  limits  impose  a  lesser  re-
straint on political speech and thus applied a lesser but still “rigorous
standard of review,” id., at 29, under which such limits “may be sus-
tained if the State demonstrates a sufficiently important interest and 
employs  means  closely  drawn  to  avoid  unnecessary  abridgement  of 
associational freedoms,” id., at 25.  Because the Court found that the 
primary  purpose  of  FECA—preventing  quid  pro  quo  corruption  and 
its  appearance—was  a  “sufficiently  important”  governmental  inter-
est, id., at 26–27, it upheld the base limit under the “closely drawn” 
test, id., at 29.  After doing so, the Court devoted only one paragraph
of  its  139-page  opinion  to  the  aggregate  limit  then  in  place  under 
FECA, noting that the provision “ha[d] not been separately addressed
at length by the parties.”  Id., at 38.  It concluded that the aggregate
limit  served  to  prevent  circumvention  of  the  base  limit  and  was  “no
more than a corollary” of that limit.  Id., at 38.  Pp. 7–9.

(2) There  is  no  need  in  this  case  to  revisit  Buckley’s  distinction 
between  contributions  and  expenditures  and  the  corresponding  dis-
tinction in standards of review.  Regardless whether strict scrutiny or
the “closely drawn” test applies, the analysis turns on the fit between
the stated governmental objective and the means selected to achieve 
that  objective.    Here,  given  the  substantial  mismatch  between  the
Government’s  stated  objective  and  the  means  selected  to  achieve  it,
the aggregate limits fail even under the “closely drawn” test.   

Buckley’s ultimate conclusion about the constitutionality of the ag-
gregate  limit  in  place  under  FECA  does  not  control  here.    Buckley
spent  just  three  sentences  analyzing  that  limit,  which  had  not  been