WASHINGTON — More than 100 years of restrictions on corporate support of political candidates will be at stake Wednesday when the Supreme Court considers whether a quirky case about a film denouncing Hillary Rodham Clinton should lead to a rewrite of the way federal elections are financed.
The justices will decide whether to move beyond the particulars of “Hillary: The Movie” to more profound questions about the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and how that squares with political spending.
The justices will consider casting aside previous rulings that uphold laws restricting corporate support of political candidates.
The court ruled in 1990 that corporations, because of their “immense aggregations of wealth,” possessed a unique ability to drown out the voices of individuals in the nation’s political conversation. That precedent was reinforced in 2003 when the court upheld the federal campaign-finance law that limits the electoral influence of corporations, unions and special-interest groups.
That the court would overturn a decision made as recently as 2003 has advocates of campaign-finance reform erupting about “judicial activism” and speaking in apocalyptic terms.
“It would unleash corporations to use their massive wealth to overwhelm the federal system, with disastrous consequences for the country,” said Fred Wertheimer, a longtime campaign-finance reformer who now heads Democracy 21, a watchdog group.
But Bradley Smith, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission who has urged the court to overturn the precedents, said that the “sky-is-falling rhetoric of the other side is simply not true.”
Smith, a Republican appointee to the commission who is now a law professor at Capital University in Ohio, said there is no evidence that corporations would spend millions of dollars of their profits targeting specific lawmakers.
That the court is considering such a broad challenge to corporate spending is a surprise. The case at hand arises from a conservative group’s production of a scathing look at Clinton produced during her run for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.
