Opinion ID: 769753
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Buckley Standard

Text: 43 VRLC, the State and the Intervenors are in essential agreement that the disclosure provisions of §§2881 and 2882 and the reporting provisions of §2883 are necessarily unconstitutional unless they apply only to advertising and mass media activities that expressly advocate the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate. Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, 80 (1976) (per curiam). This limitation reflects the Supreme Court's concern, first expressed as to the disclosure provisions of the Federal Election Campaign Act, that because such requirements can seriously infringe on privacy of association and belief guaranteed by the First Amendment, id. at 64, they must be specifically directed to [t]he governmental interests sought to be vindicated, id. at 66. The Court adopted the express advocacy standard to insure that these regulations were neither too vague, see id. at 76-79, nor intrusive on protected issue discussion, id. at 79. Even a casual reading of §§2881 and 2882's disclosure requirements, which apply to communications that expressly or implicitly advocate[] the success or defeat of a candidate (emphasis added), and §2883, which mandates immediate reporting to the state and a candidate for office of expenditures totaling $500.00 or more for mass media activities [as defined to include specified communications that 'include the name or likeness of [that] candidate'] within 30 days of a primary or general election, makes plain that each can be read to cover communications that constitute protected issue advocacy. 44 The question, then, is whether a narrowing construction can be applied to either set of provisions to rescue it from facial invalidity on the First Amendment grounds raised by VRLC. For a federal court to adopt such a narrowing construction of a state statute, the statute must be 'readily susceptible' to the limitation; we [may] not rewrite a state law to conform it to constitutional requirements. American Booksellers, 484 U.S. at 397 (citing Erznoznik v. City of Jacksonville, 422 U.S. 205 (1975), and Broadrick v. Oklahoma, 413 U.S. 601 (1973)); see also Stenberg, 120 S.Ct. at 2616-17; Boos v. Barry, 485 U.S. 312, 330,108 S.Ct. 1157,99 L.Ed.2d 333 (1988)([F]ederal courts are without power to adopt a narrowing construction of a state statute unless such a construction is reasonable and readily apparent.). We conclude that, contrary to the view of the district court, neither §§2881, 2882 nor 2883 admits of such a limiting construction.