386
Opinion of the Court
A
Precision about the relative rigor of the standard to review contribution limits was not a pretense of the Buckley per curiam opinion. To be sure, in addressing the speech claim, we explicitly rejected both O'Brien intermediate scrutiny for communicative action, see United States v. O'Brien, 391 U. S. 367 (1968), and the similar standard applicable to merely time, place, and manner restrictions, see Adderley v. Florida, 385 U. S. 39 (1966); Cox v. Louisiana, 379 U. S. 536 (1965); Kovacs v. Cooper, 336 U. S. 77 (1949). In distinguishing these tests, the discussion referred generally to "the exacting scrutiny required by the First Amendment," Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U. S., at 16, and added that " 'the constitutional guarantee has its fullest and most urgent application precisely to the conduct of campaigns for political office,' " id., at 15 (quoting Monitor Patriot Co. v. Roy, 401 U. S. 265, 272 (1971)).
We then, however, drew a line between expenditures and contributions, treating expenditure restrictions as direct restraints on speech, 424 U. S., at 19, which nonetheless suffered little direct effect from contribution limits:
"[A] limitation upon the amount that any one person or group may contribute to a candidate or political committee entails only a marginal restriction upon the contributor's ability to engage in free communication. A contribution serves as a general expression of support for the candidate and his views, but does not communicate the underlying basis for the support. The quantity of communication by the contributor does not increase perceptibly with the size of his contribution, since the expression rests solely on the undifferentiated symbolic act of contributing. At most, the size of the contribution provides a very rough index of the intensity of the contributor's support for the candidate. A limitation on the amount of money a person may give to a candidate or
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