Court Opinion

ID: 9428548
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:24:06.453187+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:14.222389
License: Public Domain

*301Justice Marshall,
concurring in the judgment.
The Court today holds that a local ordinance restricting the amount of money that an individual can contribute to a committee organized to support or oppose a ballot measure violates the right to freedom of speech and association guaranteed by the First Amendment. In reaching this conclusion, however, the Court fails to indicate whether or not it attaches any constitutional significance to the fact that the Berkeley ordinance seeks to limit contributions as opposed to direct expenditures. As Justice White correctly notes in dissent, beginning with our decision in Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U. S. 1 (1976), this Court has always drawn a distinction between restrictions on contributions, and direct limitations on the amount an individual can expend for his own speech. As we noted last term in California Medical Assn. v. FEC, 453 U. S. 182, 196 (1980) (Marshall, J., joined by Brennan, White, and Stevens, JJ.), the “‘speech by proxy’” that is achieved through contributions to a political campaign committee “is not the sort of political advocacy that this Court in Buckley found entitled to full First Amendment protection.”
Because the Court’s opinion is silent on the standard of review it is applying to this contributions limitation, I must assume that the Court is following our consistent position that this type of governmental action is subjected to less rigorous scrutiny than a direct restriction on expenditures. The city of Berkeley seeks to justify its ordinance on the ground that it is necessary to maintain voter confidence in government. If I found that the record before the California Supreme Court disclosed sufficient evidence to justify the conclusion that large contributions to ballot measure committees undermined the “confidence of the citizenry in government,” First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U. S. 765, 790 (1978), I would join Justice White in dissent on the ground that the State had demonstrated a sufficient governmental interest to sustain the indirect infringement on First Amend*302ment interests resulting from the operation of the Berkeley ordinance. Like Justices Blackmun and O’Connor, however, I find no such evidentiary support in this record. I therefore concur in the judgment.