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Opinion of Kennedy, J.
interests asserted to justify § 323(a). Any anticircumvention interest can be only as compelling as the interest justifying the underlying regulation.
None of these other sections has an independent justifying interest. Section 323(b), for example, adds regulation only to activity undertaken by a state party. In the District Court two of the three judges found as fact that particular state and local parties exist primarily to participate in state and local elections, that they spend the majority of their resources on those elections, and that their voter registration and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) activities, in particular, are directed primarily at state and local elections. See 251 F. Supp. 2d, at 301-302 (Henderson, J., concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part); id., at 837-840 (Leon, J.). These findings, taken together with BCRA's other, valid prohibitions barring coordination with federal candidates or officeholders and their soft-money solicitation, demonstrate that § 323(b) does not add regulation to conduct that poses a danger of a federal candidate's or officeholder's receipt of quids.
Even § 323(b)'s narrowest regulation, which bans state party soft-money funded ads that (1) refer to a clearly identified federal candidate, and (2) either support or attack any candidate for the office of the clearly mentioned federal candidate, see new FECA § 301(20)(A)(iii), fails the constitutional test. The ban on conduct that by the statute's own definition may serve the interest of a federal candidate suggests to the majority that it is conduct that poses quid pro quo danger for federal candidates or officeholders. Yet, even this effect—considered after excising the coordination and candidate-solicited funding aspects elsewhere prohibited by BCRA §§ 202 and 214(a) and new FECA § 323(a)—poses no danger of a federal candidate's or officeholder's receipt of a quid. That conduct is no different from an individual's independent expenditure referring to and supporting
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