Democracy or Plutocracy? The Case for a Constitutional Amendment to Overturn Buckley v. Valeo

Abstract

In the early 1970s the U.S. Congress made a serious effort to stop the abuses of campaign financing by setting limits on contributions and also on campaign spending. In the 1976 case of Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court upheld the regulation of contributions, but invalidated the regulation of campaign spending as a violation of the First Amendment. Since then, lavish campaigns, with their attendant evils, have become an ever more serious problem. Multimillion-dollar campaigns for the Senate, and even for the House of Representatives, have become commonplace. Various statutory solutions to the problem have been proposed, but these will not be adequate unless the Congress—and the states—are permitted to stop the escalation by setting limits. What is needed is a constitutional amendment to reverse the Buckley holding, as proposed by several members of Congress. This would not mean a weakening of the Bill of Rights, since the Buckley ruling was a distortion of the First Amendment. Within reasonable financial limits there is ample opportunity for that “uninhibited, robust and wide-open” debate of the issues that the Supreme Court correctly wants to protect.