Court Opinion

ID: 9428467
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:23:54.792541+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:13.610526
License: Public Domain

Justice Blackmun,
concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
I join Parts I, II, and IV of Justice Marshall’s opinion which, to that extent, becomes an opinion for the Court.
I write separately, however, to note my view of appellants’ First Amendment claims. Part III of the opinion appears to *202rest on the premise that the First Amendment test to be applied to contribution limitations is different from the test applicable to expenditure limitations. I do not agree with that proposition. Although I dissented in part in Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U. S. 1, 290 (1976), I am willing to accept as binding the Court’s judgment in that case that the contribution limitations challenged there were constitutional. Id., at 23-38. But it does not follow that I must concur in the plurality conclusion today, ante, at 196, that political contributions are not entitled to full First Amendment protection. It is true that there is language in Buckley that might suggest that conclusion, see, e. g., 424 U. S., at 20-23, and it was to such language that I referred when I suggested in my dissent that the Court had failed to make a principled constitutional distinction between expenditure and contribution limitations. Id., at 290. At the same time, however, Buckley states that “contribution and expenditure limitations both implicate fundamental First Amendment interests,” id., at 23, and that “governmental 'action which may have the effect of curtailing the freedom to associate is subject to the closest scrutiny/ ” id., at 25, quoting NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U. S. 449, 460-461 (1958). Thus, contribution limitations can be upheld only “if the State demonstrates a sufficiently important interest and employs means closely drawn to avoid unnecessary abridgment of associational freedoms.” 424 U. S., at 25. See Note, The Unconstitutionality of Limitations on Contributions to Political Committees in the 1976 Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments, 86 Yale L. J. 953, 961-962 (1977).
Unlike the plurality, I would apply this “rigorous standard of review,” 424 U. S., at 29, to the instant case, rather than relying on what I believe to be a mistaken view that contributions are “not the sort of political advocacy . . . entitled to full First Amendment protection.” Ante, at 196. Appellees claim that 2 U. S. C. § 441a (a) (1) (C) is justified by the gov*203ernmental interest in preventing apparent or actual political corruption. That this interest is important cannot be doubted. It is a closer question, however, whether the statute is narrowly drawn to advance that interest. Nonetheless, I conclude that contributions to multicandidate political committees may be limited to $5,000 per year as a means of preventing evasion of the limitations on contributions to a candidate or his authorized campaign committee upheld in Buckley. The statute challenged here is thus analogous to the $25,000 limitation on total contributions in a given year that Buckley held to be constitutional. 424 U. S., at 38.
I stress, however, that this analysis suggests that a different result would follow if § 441a (a)(1)(C) were applied to contributions to a political committee established for the purpose of making independent expenditures, rather than contributions to candidates. By definition, a multicandidate political committee like CALPAC makes contributions to five or more candidates for federal office. § 441a (a) (4). Multicandidate political committees are therefore essentially conduits for contributions to candidates, and as such they pose a perceived threat of actual or potential corruption. In contrast, contributions to a committee that makes only independent expenditures pose no such threat. The Court repeatedly has recognized that “[e]ffective advocacy of both public and private points of view, particularly controversial ones, is undeniably enhanced by group association . . . .” NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U. S., at 460. By pooling their resources, adherents of an association amplify their own voices, see Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U. S., at 22; the association “is but the medium through which its individual members seek to make more effective the expression of their own views.” NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U. S., at 459. Accordingly, I believe that contributions to political committees can be limited only if those contributions implicate the governmental interest in preventing actual or potential corruption, and if the limitation is no broader than necessary to achieve that interest. Because this narrow test *204is satisfied here, I concur in the result reached in Part III of Justice Marshall’s opinion.