Doug Lair v. Steve Bullock

We are called on to determine whether Montana’s dollar limits on contributions to political candidates are constitutional under the federal Constitution’s First Amendment. The claims against the limits are familiar. Limitations on contributions effectively abridge free speech in two primary ways. First, the contribution itself is a general expression of the donor’s support for the candidate and his views. Limiting the amount a donor can contribute curtails that expression. Second, it costs the candidate money to produce political speech that will be heard. Without that money, candidates will be silenced; their ideas will not be considered by the voters at elections.

These claims are doubly familiar to us because we have already considered some of Montana’s contribution limits and found they passed constitutional muster. Why consider them again? We must because, after Citizens United, what constitutes a sufficiently important staté interest to justify limits on contributions has changed. Now, the prevention of quid pro quo corruption, or its appearance, is the only sufficiently important state interest to justify limits on campaign contributions. Before Citizens United,…