Court allows campaign finance challenges
on Jan 23, 2006 at 10:31 am
The Supreme Court ruled on Monday, without dissent, that it has not barred all challenges to actual operation in practice of federal campaign finance restrictions on political advertising. It ordered a lower court to reconsider an “as-applied” challenge by an anti-abortion group, Wisconsin Right to Life Inc. The unsigned opinion, only two and a half pages in length, was announced by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. It ordered a three-judge District Court to consider the merits of the organization’s complaint.
The decision came in a case argued just last Tuesday — Wisconsin Right to Life v. Federal Election Commission (04-1581). The anti-abortion organization contends that the new federal campaign finance law’s restrictions on political ads close to election-time is unconstitutional when it is applied to grass-roots lobbying efforts.
A three-judge U.S. District Court on May 10, 2005, dismissed the group’s lawsuit, concluding that the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision upholding the ban on so-called “electioneering communications” left “no room for this kind of ‘as applied’ challenge.” On Monday, however, the Supreme Court said that the District Court had misread the 2003 ruling. In upholding the campaign ad restriction “against a facial challenge, we did not purport to resolve future as-applied challenges,” the Court said. (Rick Hasen has a fuller discussion of the impact of this ruling at Election Law blog, here.)
Granting review of no new cases, the Court denied review of an appeal by Research In Motion, Ltd., the Canadian maker of the BlackBerry hand-held e-mail device, challenging a finding that it violated patents held by a Virginia company. RIM is now faced either with settling the patent dispute, or coming out with an altered device that gets around the patented process, because a federal judge is considering a possible order to stop all sales and services of BlackBerry devices in the U.S. (The case is Research In Motion v. NTP Inc. (05-763).
The Court took no action on two major pending cases: the challenge to the war on terrorism detention of a U.S. citizen, Jose Padilla (Padilla v. Hanft, 05-533), and the federal government’s appeal seeking to salvage the ban on so-called “partial birth” abortions (Ashcroft v. Carhart, 05-380).
On another war on terrorism case, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (05-184), the Court refused to order a new round of briefing on the question of its jurisdiction to rule on that case in the wake of the limits on courts imposed by the new Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. But Monday’s order makes no real difference: the jurisdictional issue is being fully briefed as a result of the federal government’s filing of a motion to dismiss that case under the new Act. Hamdan’s brief on that issue is due Jan. 31. Chief Justice Roberts disqualified himself on the new briefing order, as expected, because he sat on the D.C. Circuit Court when the case was decided there. (Meanwhile, the Court announced that it would hear oral argument on the Hamdan case on Tuesday, March 28, at 11 a.m.)
The Court also took no action on the issue of mid-decade congressional redistricting in the Colorado case of Lance v. Dennis (05-555).
In one of the more surprising developments of the day, the Court refused to hear an appeal by Minnesota officials seeking to revive two restrictions on political activity by candidates running for seats on state courts. The Eighth Circuit struck down both of the provisions at issue — one barring judicial candidates from soliciting campaign donations, and the other barring them from identifying themselves as members of a political party. The case is Dimick v. Republican Party of Minnesota (05-566).
Among the three rulings issued on argued cases, the Court rejected claims by Virginia state colleges that they are immune to attempts to recover money that a college book vendor paid to them before going bankrupt. The Court said it was not answering the broader question of whether the Constitution’s bankruptcy clause gives Congress the authority to take away states’ 11th Amendment immunity to private lawsuits filed by bankrupts. Rather, the Court concluded that the states, in agreeing to the Constitution in 1789, had accepted that federal courts could carry out uniform bankruptcy laws by authorizing collection of at least some money from states and restoring it to the debtor.
That ruling, written by Justice John Paul Stevens but announced by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in his absence, divided the Court 5-4. Chief Justice John G. Roberts joined in the dissenting opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas. (The case is Central Virginia Community College v. Katz, 04-885).
The Court’s other two rulings and several of its other orders brought results worth noting.
In its third ruling on Monday, the Court by a vote of 7-2 limited the right of losing parties in federal civil cases to appeal on the issue of the sufficiency of the evidence. The ruling came in the case of Unitherm Food Systems v. Swift-Eckrich (04-597).
The Court raised the prospect that agencies that hire home health care workers to go into family homes to care for the aged or infirm may not be required to pay minimum wages and overtime under federal law. The Court ordered the Second Circuit to reconsider a decision in July 2004 that the Labor Department had no authority to exempt those agencies’ workers from wage and hour laws. The Court, responding to a move by the Labor Department to solidify its view on that issue with a new regulation, told the Circuit Court to examine that regulation as it reconsiders the case of Long Island Care at Home v. Coke (04-1315).
In an original case, New Jersey v. Delaware (134 Original), the Court named a Portland, Maine, attorney, Ralph Lancaster, to review the case and prepare an initial recommended decision. On Nov. 28, the Court had agreed to allow the state of New Jersey to sue the state of Delaware directly in the Court in an interstate dispute over plans to build a large new natural gas loading facility for supertankers along the Delaware River that forms a border between the two states.
Among the cases denied review were Seegars v. Gonzales (05-365), an attempt by five Washington, D.C., residents seeking to revive their challenge to D.C.’s strong anti-gun law, and Wurzburger v. Galvin (05-519), an appeal by parents of children attending parochial schools in Massachusetts seeking to salvage their campaign to get a public subsidy constitutional amendment on the ballot for state voters. Chief Justice Roberts was recused in the D.C. case because he was on the D.C. Circuit when it denied en banc review of the denial of standing to the gun fanciers.
