Opinion ID: 2494205
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Application to Maine's Election Statutes

Text: Drawing on these cases, NOM argues that the statutes before us are unconstitutionally overbroad because they reach issue advocacy as well as express advocacy of a candidate's election or defeat. NOM's argument presumes that the distinction between issue discussion and express advocacy is relevant to the review of the statutes here. That is not the case for a couple of reasons. First, the issue/express advocacy dichotomy has only arisen in a narrow set of circumstances not present here. From the beginning, the distinction's primary purview has been cases scrutinizing limits on independent expenditures. [28] The statute that prompted the Buckley Court to introduce the express advocacy construction was a blanket $1,000 limit on independent expenditures. 424 U.S. at 41-44, 96 S.Ct. 612. The more recent Supreme Court precedents to make use of the express/issue advocacy distinction addressed a narrower federal law prohibiting corporations and labor unions from employing general treasury funds to pay for electioneering communications targeting candidates for election. See McConnell, 540 U.S. at 189-209, 124 S.Ct. 619; Wis. Right to Life, 551 U.S. at 464-82, 127 S.Ct. 2652. This line of cases came to a definitive end with Citizens United, which held limitations on such expenditures by corporations and unions to be unconstitutional, and thus effectively prohibited any law limiting independent expenditures regardless of the identity of the regulated entity. 130 S.Ct. at 896-913. As the present case does not involve a limit on independent expenditures, the relevance of these cases is limited at best. Second, and more fundamentally, the Supreme Court has explicitly rejected an attempt to import [the] distinction between issue and express advocacy into the consideration of disclosure requirements. Id. at 915; see also id. ([W]e reject Citizens United's contention that the disclosure requirements must be limited to speech that is the functional equivalent of express advocacy.). The provisions before us are all effectively disclosure laws, in that they require the divulgence of information to the public or the Commission, but do not directly limit speech. [29] We find it reasonably clear, in light of Citizens United, that the distinction between issue discussion and express advocacy has no place in First Amendment review of these sorts of disclosure-oriented laws. Accord Human Life of Wash. Inc. v. Brumsickle, 624 F.3d 990, 1016 (9th Cir.2010) (Given the Court's analysis in Citizens United, and its holding that the government may impose disclosure requirements on speech, the position that disclosure requirements cannot constitutionally reach issue advocacy is unsupportable.). Thus, to the extent that NOM's overbreadth arguments turn on the distinction between issue discussion and express advocacy, we reject them.