ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A U.S. judge has ruled that the campaign finance law banning corporations from making contributions to federal candidates is unconstitutional, citing the Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United decision last year in his analysis.
In a ruling issued late Thursday, U.S. District Judge James Cacheris tossed out part of an indictment against two men charged with illegally reimbursing donors to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2006 Senate and 2008 presidential campaigns.
Cacheris said that under the Citizens United decision, corporations enjoy the same rights as individuals to contribute to campaigns.
The ruling from the federal judge in Virginia is the first of its kind. The Citizens United case had applied only to corporate spending on campaign activities by independent groups, such as ads run by third parties to favor one side, not to direct contributions to the candidates themselves.
Cacheris noted in his ruling that only one other court has addressed the issue in the wake of the Citizens United ruling. A federal judge in Minnesota ruled the other way, allowing a state ban on corporate contributions to stand.
“(F)or better or worse, Citizens United held that there is no distinction between an individual and a corporation with respect to political speech,” Cacheris wrote in his 52-page opinion. “Thus, if an individual can make direct contributions within (the law’s) limits, a corporation cannot be banned from doing the same thing.”
In court papers, federal prosecutors defending the law said overturning the ban on corporate contributions would ignore a century of legal precedent.
Peter Carr, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney in Alexandria, which is prosecuting the case, said Friday that the office is reviewing the ruling.
Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a Washington-based group that supports campaign finance reform, said Friday that Cacheris overstepped his bounds and ignored Supreme Court rulings issued before Citizens United that explicitly upheld the ban on corporate contributions. If the high court wanted to overturn the ban, it could have done so directly in Citizens United.
