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Opinion of the Court
phasis added)); § 441i(b)(1) (same for state and local party committees).
These observations do not, however, require us to sustain plaintiffs' facial challenge to § 323(d)'s donation restriction. "When the validity of an act of the Congress is drawn in question, and . . . a serious doubt of constitutionality is raised, it is a cardinal principle that this Court will first ascertain whether a construction of the statute is fairly possible by which the question may be avoided." Crowell v. Benson, 285 U. S. 22, 62 (1932); see also Boos v. Barry, 485 U. S. 312, 331 (1988); New York v. Ferber, 458 U. S. 747, 769, n. 24 (1982). Given our obligation to avoid constitutional problems, we narrowly construe § 323(d)'s ban to apply only to donations of funds not raised in compliance with FECA. This construction is consistent with the concerns animating Title I, whose purpose is to plug the soft-money loophole. Though there is little legislative history regarding BCRA generally, and almost nothing on § 323(d) specifically, the abuses identified in the 1998 Senate Report regarding campaign finance practices involve the use of nonprofit organizations as conduits for large soft-money donations. See, e. g., 3 1998 Senate Report 4565 ("The evidence indicates that the soft-money loophole is fueling many of the campaign abuses investigated by the Committee. . . . Soft money also supplied the funds parties used to make contributions to tax-exempt groups, which in turn used the funds to pay for election-related activities"); id., at 4568-4569 (describing as an "egregious exampl[e]" of misuse a $4.6 million donation of nonfederal funds by the RNC to Americans for Tax Reform, which the organization spent on "direct mail and phone bank operations to counter anti-Republican advertising"). We have found no evidence that Congress was concerned about, much less that it intended to prohibit, donations of money already fully regulated by FECA. Given Title I's exclusive focus on abuses related to soft money, we would expect that if Congress meant § 323(d)'s restriction to have this dramatic and
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