Others have noted in the past that Justice Breyer seems ill-informed on campaign finance laws. During today’s oral argument in McComish v. Bennett, involving a challenge to a state law having nothing to do with the federal law known as McCain-McCain, Breyer stated, ““What’s going through my mind is we are deeply into the details of a very complex bill. McCain-Feingold is hundreds of pages, and we cannot possibly test each provision which is related to the others on such a test of whether it equalizes or incentivizes or some other thing, because the answer is normally we don’t know.”
Does the Justice understand what McCain-Feingold did and did not do? McCain-Feingold, a federal law also known as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, had nothing to do with government financing of campaigns. McComish v. Bennett is a challenge to an Arizona law that provides government financing for the campaigns of some candidates.
Happy to give the Justice the benefit of a doubt, but he has shown a failure to understand the law in the past, perhaps a tribute to its complexity. And by giving him the benefit of a doubt that he understands the differences between McCain-Feingold and the Arizona state statute, his question becomes quite a non-sequitur.
