More than thirty states had spending limits as part of their campaign finance laws prior to 1974, when Congress enacted them at the federal level. While a lot less money was spent on campaigns then, voter turnout and civic involvement was generally higher than it is today.

After the federal limits were passed as part of a comprehensive reform bill, the Supreme Court reviewed the law on a rushed basis, with little time to examine evidence about the impact of spending limits. In the infamous 1976 case Buckley v Valeo, the Court assumed that limiting candidate spending would reduce the public debate and that spending limits would not create a less corrupt electoral process. With twenty-twenty hindsight, it is clear that the Court was simply wrong in these conjectures.

Even though the Buckley ruling was for federal races, most states and localities repealed their spending limits in its wake, rather than face a mountain of litigation to defend them in court.

At the urging of non-partisan civic organizations like the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG), the Vermont legislature bucked this trend of compliance in 1997. Vermont passed a law that included mandatory limits on campaign spending, a direct challenge to Buckley.

In reviewing the Vermont law, a federal appeals court has ruled that Buckley does not preclude all limits on campaign spending. A Vermont right to life group appealed this case to the U.S. Supreme Court on May 12, 2005.

TheRestofUs.org will file an amicus brief that urges the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the Vermont case as a way to revisit its ill advised Buckley ruling.

We filed a similar brief in a case out of Albuquerque, New Mexico in October of 2004. Those breifs are below:

Read the friend of the Court brief submitted by TheRestofUs.org, New Mexico PIRG and the National Association of State PIRGs, Common Cause, Public Campaign, Demos, the Committee for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and ReclaimDemocracy.org.

Read the brief submitted by Senators Ernest Hollings, Ted Stevens, Robert Byrd, Jack Reed, Chuck Schmumer, Chris Dodd, Diane Feinstein, and Arlen Specter.

Read the brief submitted by Attorneys General from Connecticut, Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Vermont, and Wisconsion.

Read the brief submitted by Secretaries of State from New Mexico, Oregon, Iowa, and Wisconsin.

Read the brief sumitted by the Brennan Center for Justice and state judges

Read the brief submitted by the Equal Justice Society, NAACP, Fannie Lou Hamer Project, National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, National Bar Association, Latino Issues Forum, and Greelining Institute.

Learn more by visiting BuckBuckley.com