In a ruling that could influence the Supreme Court’s upcoming review of the new federal soft money restrictions, a federal appeals court held on August 12, 2003, that Alaska’s ban on soft money contributions to political parties is constitutional. The 3-0 ruling, issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, overturned a federal district court’s decision striking down the ban on First Amendment grounds. NVRI, with the assistance of David A. Wilson and James M. Dowd of the Washington, D.C. office of Hale and Dorr, LLP, filed an amicus brief in support of Alaska’s soft-money ban.

The ruling represents a major victory, as the Ninth Circuit’s decision is the first federal appellate decision upholding a soft-money ban against a First Amendment challenge. The U. S. Supreme Court is set to rule on similar challenges to the federal soft money ban sponsored by Senators John McCain and Russell Feingold and enacted by Congress last year.

In recent years, wealthy special interests increasingly have exploited the soft-money loophole to funnel huge, unlimited donations to the national political parties, undermining existing "hard-money" limits on the amounts that donors may contribute for federal election campaigns. These soft-money contributions have been implicated in countless stories of improper influence linking soft money with everything from White House coffees to weakened tobacco legislation, bankruptcy "reform" that benefits creditors at the expense of consumers, stalled pharmaceutical pricing legislation, and similar policy outcomes. NVRI’s amicus brief in the Alaska case argued that limits on soft-money contributions are constitutionally permissible because of the strong governmental interest in preventing large donors from wielding improper influence over parties and their candidates.

In upholding Alaska’s ban on corporate soft-money donations, the appeals court stated: "Alaska is entitled to regulate corporate participation in politics in order to prevent corporations from parlaying state-created economic advantages into advantages in political debate." The court also held that Alaska’s $5,000 limit on individual contributions to political parties "was justified by the dangers of corruption and the appearance of corruption posed by large donations to political parties, and by the danger that soft money donations to parties would be used to circumvent hard money limits." In important judicial language, the court continued: "[A] failure to regulate the arena of campaign finance allows the influence of wealthy individuals and corporations to drown out the voices of individual citizens, producing a political system unresponsive to the needs and desires of the public and causing the public to become disillusioned with and mistrustful of the political system."

The Ninth Circuit’s ruling, while upholding the crucial soft money provisions of the statute, ruled that the contribution ban was unconstitutional as applied to volunteer legal services provided by the attorney-plaintiffs to a state political party. NVRI’s amicus brief addressed only the overall soft-money ban and not its application to volunteer services.

In addition to the National Voting Rights Institute’s amicus brief, United States Senators John McCain and Russell Feingold and United States Representatives Christopher Shays and Martin Meehan filed an amici brief in support of Alaska’s soft money ban. McCain, Feingold, Shays, and Meehan are the chief sponsors of the new reform law passed by Congress and now under review by the Supreme Court. NVRI has also filed an amicus brief before the Supreme Court supporting the federal soft money restrictions.

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