Sonia Sotomayor may not have a long paper trail on hot button social issues, but in one area of the law—campaign finance—she has staked a position that could have far-reaching political consequences.
The clarity of her support for limits on campaign fundraising and her background as a pioneering campaign regulator is raising eyebrows among election law experts who say her record is more substantial and explicit than that of any Supreme Court nominee since the dawn of the modern, post-Watergate campaign finance regime.
“There hasn’t been one with as vigorously expressed policy views on campaign finance as this one that I am aware of, and I’ve been pretty aware for a number of years,” said James Bopp, a leading conservative attorney who has won four Supreme Court cases challenging campaign finance regulations.
“I can’t think of anybody who has had such a track record,” said Bob Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies and a follower of battles on the issue since the early 1970s. “There are clearly going to be cases coming before the court that will be challenges to the law, and there will be some very important cases.”
Sotomayor brings hands-on experience to the issue from her four years of experience on the New York City Campaign Finance Board, an independent, nonpartisan city agency created in 1988. One of the first members appointed to the board by then-Mayor Ed Koch, Sotomayor helped implement—enthusiastically, according to her cohorts—one of the most comprehensive campaign finance laws in the country.
In a rare and little-noticed law review article, she forcefully defended the policy motivations behind such restrictions, questioning the line between campaign contributions and “bribes,” calling on Congress to overhaul campaign finance laws – including suggesting public financing of its own elections – and blasting the Federal Election Commission for not enforcing existing laws.
“The continued failure to do this has greatly damaged public trust in officials and exacerbated the public's sense that no higher morality is in place by which public officials measure their conduct,” she wrote in a law review article based on a speech she gave to Suffolk University Law School in 1996, when she was a federal district court judge.
On the only occasion when she was confronted with the issue as a jurist, Sotomayor joined a decision that effectively gave a pass to a Vermont law that severely limited campaign contributions and capped campaign spending – a law that the Supreme Court later overturned as a First Amendment violation.
While Sotomayor’s support for limits on campaign fundraising thrills clean election advocates, it positions her squarely against several prominent Senate Republicans—including members of the Judiciary Committee—who vigorously oppose similar campaign finance rules and it is inflaming small-government conservatives who consider such regulations an affront to the First Amendment.
The extent to which Sotomayor’s policy preferences color her judicial philosophy on campaign finance regulation is not entirely clear. And since Sotomayor would replace Justice David Souter, who has reliably sided with supporters of stricter rules, few expect her to affect the court’s balance of power on the issue in the near term. But advocates for more stringent campaign finance rules hope that over the long run, Sotomayor, who is only 54 years old, could reverse a shift towards deregulating political money that took off when former President George W. Bush’s appointees – Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito – formed a fairly reliable anti-campaign regulation majority with Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
“When you put a relatively young person on the court with
kinds of views, it may matter a great deal down the line,” said Rick Hasen, an election law professor at Loyola Law School who runs the influential Election Law Blog, which tends to favor stricter regulation. “Having three or four younger justices who take the view that regulation is constitutional could be quite significant.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20090529/pl_politico/23070
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