434
Syllabus
spending has been unlimited. Thus, the Party's claim that coordinated spending beyond the Act's limit is essential to its very function as a party amounts implicitly to saying that for almost three decades political parties have not been quite functional or have been functioning in systematic violation of the law. The Court cannot accept either implication. Pp. 449-450.
(2) There is a different weakness in the seemingly unexceptionable premise that parties are organized for the purpose of electing candidates, so that imposing on the way parties serve that function is uniquely burdensome. The fault here is a refusal to see how the power of money actually works in the political structure. Looking directly at a party's function in getting and spending money, it would ignore reality to think that the party role is adequately described by speaking generally of electing particular candidates. Parties are necessarily the instruments of some contributors, such as PACs, whose object is not to support the party's message or to elect party candidates, but rather to support a specific candidate for the sake of a position on one, narrow issue, or even to support any candidate who will be obliged to contributors. Parties thus perform functions more complex than simply electing their candidates: they act as agents for spending on behalf of those who seek to produce obligated officeholders. It is this party role, which functionally unites parties with other self-interested political actors, that the Party Expenditure Provision targets. Pp. 450-452.
(3) The Court agrees insofar as the Party suggests that its strong working relationship with candidates and its unique ability to speak in coordination with them should be taken into account in the First Amendment analysis. It is the accepted understanding that a party combines its members' power to speak by aggregating their contributions and broadcasting its messages more widely than its individual contributors generally could afford to do, and it marshals this power with greater sophistication than individuals generally could, using such mechanisms as speech coordinated with a candidate. Cf. Colorado I, 518 U. S., at 637. It does not, however, follow from a party's efficiency in getting large sums and spending intelligently that limits on a party's coordinated spending should be scrutinized under an unusually high standard. In fact, any argument from sophistication and power would cut both ways. On the one hand, one can seek the benefit of stricter scrutiny of a law capping party coordinated spending by emphasizing the heavy burden imposed by limiting the most effective mechanism of sophisticated spending. And yet it is exactly this efficiency culminating in coordinated spending that (on the Government's view) places a party in a position to be used to circumvent contribution limits that apply to individuals and PACs, and thereby to exacerbate the threat of
Page: Index Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007