Last Wednesday's 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, as you've no doubt, heard struck down the aggregate limits on campaign contributions imposed by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (2002). What they did uphold was a cap on donations to individual candidates and parties. Under the new, Roberts-approved BCRA, an individual still cannot donate more than $2,600 to any one candidate per election, but the ruling in McCutcheon means that they can give $2,600 to each single candidate. Before, they could only donate a maximum of $123,200 for each election cycle.
Here we could go off on a discussion of the legal arguments at work, whether money has a corrupting influence on politics or how compelling the government's interest in preventing corruption really is: that's all for our partner group, Dartmouth Rootstrikers. We're not going to do that; what we're really interested in here is the empirical effect the ruling in McCutcheon will have on campaign spending this cycle. Numbers, if you will.
