A week and a half ago, Judge Cacheris created quite a stir by holding a 100-year-old ban on corporate contributions unconstitutional. It was later found that government lawyers failed to cite controlling precedent on the matter, FEC v. Beaumont, where the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of banning direct corporate campaign contributions.
Judge Cacheris decided to reexamine his decision, which leads us to the next chapter in this saga. The Judge released a ruling today upholding his original decision, explaining:
…this court will not reinstate the dismissed counts first because Beaumont’s holding applies only to nonprofit advocacy corporations, meaning that it does not “directly control” this case for Agnostini purposes, and the second because Beaumont’s reasoning was supplanted by Citizens United.
On the first point, only the Supreme Court can overrule its own cases, and this Court must follow any Supreme Court case that “directly controls” the question before it. Beaumont remains good law, but its “hold[ing,] that applying the prohibition to nonprofit adcocacy corporations is consistent with the First Amendment,” does not directly control this case because Defendants’ corporation is not a “nonprofit advocacy corporation.”
Second, Beaumont’s reasoning can still inform this Court’s analysis, but only as far as this Court can square it with the more recent Citizens United decision, which this court cannot. The Supreme Court reasoned in Citizens United that because individuals can make independent political expenditures without risking corruption, corporations must be allowed to do so as well because “the First Amendment does not allow political speech restrictions based on a speaker’s corporate identity.” It follow that, because individuals can make direct donations within limits without risking corruption, and because the government cannot restrict political speech based on a speaker’s corporate identity, corporations must be allowed to donate subject to the same limits.
