Kreml: "The Seventh Amendment: The Key to Reversing Buckley v. Valeo"
ACS released an issue brief entitled "The Seventh Amendment: The Key to Reversing Buckley v. Valeo" by William P. Kreml, distinguished professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina--Columbia. Professor Kreml argues that our campaign finance system implicates the relationship between debtors and creditors, with large campaign contributions being similar to unencumbered contracts of the eighteenth century that undermine the democracy that the Bill of Rights was enacted to protect, and therefore the regulation of such contributions is constitutional.
Just as two very different sets of motivations created the American constitutional order, so also there are two very different kinds of campaign contributions. Large and small contributions might at first appear to fall along a continuum, but that's not so. The large contribution and the small contribution are constitutional opposites. In fact, the term "large campaign contribution" is an oxymoron. A larger contribution is akin to a contract. The grander a contribution is, the more an expectation exists that something will be granted to the donor in return.
It was the need for a rebalancing of large and small contributions, after the outsize contributions to the Richard Nixon campaigns of 1968 and 1972 and the initial burst of TV advertising budgets, that led to the congressional legislation which Buckley v. Valeo partly overturned. For the 1976 Supreme Court to have confused the true purpose of the Bill of Rights—to facilitate political participation—with what they wound up protecting in Buckley—unencumbered contributions by corporations and an elite few—was, at best, uninformed.