Political Action Committees

Political action committees (PACs) are organizations dedicated to fundraising and supporting the election or defeat of specific political candidates. Their existence traces back to 1944, when the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) supported efforts to reelect President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. To avoid violation of the Smith Connally Act of 1943, which prohibited federal candidates from receiving contributions from labor unions, the CIO encouraged its union members to voluntarily contribute directly to the PACs effort to support the Roosevelt campaign. These efforts proved so successful that numerous other PACs soon appeared. Today, PACs literally raise billions of dollars in support of thousands of political candidates at both state and federal levels.

Although the number of PACs grew continuously through the 1950s and 1960s, they reached their real prominence during the 1970s. It was then that Congress attempted to limit some of the “big money” influence in national elections by enacting the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA). In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed the constitutionality of FECA in Buckley v. Valeo. At issue was the conflict between limiting campaign abuses and infringing on the rights of free speech and association contained within the First Amendment. Since all political groups require money to grow and to convey their message, any restrictions on fundraising or campaign spending could impact an organization's First Amendment rights. In a decision nearly 300 pages in length, the Supreme Court distinguished between contributions and expenditures by stating that, constitutionally, restrictions on contributions were less harmful to freedom of association and speech than were limitations on expenditures. As a result, while the Court struck down FECA provisions limiting presidential candidates' use of their own or their immediate family's money to $50,000 and restricting “independent spending” by others in support of a federal office candidate, it upheld FECA provisions placing maximum limits on the amount individuals or groups can contribute to federal office candidates. It also limited the public finance process for presidential candidates whereby funds are matched in primaries and caucuses, while allowing the general election to be fully funded, in exchange for spending limits by candidates.

In subsequent decades, the Supreme Court continued to examine a number of issues concerning independent expenditures. In Federal Election Commission v. National Conservative Political Action Committee in 1985, the Court struck down a spending restriction on independent political committees supporting presidential candidates who had accepted public funding, ruling such expenditures “produce speech at the core of the First Amendment.” Then, in 1996, the Supreme Court addressed a provision of FECA limiting the amount of “coordinated expenditures” a political party could spend in connection with the campaign of a congressional candidate. Ruling that such spending should not be presumed to be coordinated, and maintaining that First Amendment protections applied to these expenditures, the Court in Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee v. FEC (Colorado I) said that spending limits are unconstitutional as long as the party's media campaign develops independently of the party's nominee. Finally, in 2001, the Supreme Court examined the issue of expenditures that were, in fact, coordinated between a political party and the candidate's campaign in Federal Election Commission v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee (Colorado II). Ruling that such coordinated expenditures were similar to contributions to the candidate, thus circumventing contribution [Page 679]restrictions, five justices ruled the First Amendment was not a protection against “coordinated expenditure” limitations.

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