A Long Record on Campaign Finance, Often in Support of Regulations (original) (raw)
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Judge Sonia Sotomayor, left, in 1990 when she was a member of the New York City Campaign Finance Board and served with Nicole Gordon, center, and the Rev. A. O’Hare.Credit...Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times
- May 29, 2009
WASHINGTON In 1996, Judge Sonia Sotomayor delivered a speech comparing campaign contributions to “bribes” and asking whether elected officials could credibly say they were “representing only the general public good, when private money plays such a large role” in helping them win office.
“If they cannot, the public must demand a change in the role of private money or find other ways, such as through strict, well-enforced regulation, to ensure that politicians are not inappropriately influenced in their legislative or executive decision-making by the interests that give them contributions,” she said.
The 1996 speech, a version of which was later published in a law journal, is not the only public marker in the record of Judge Sotomayor, who is now President Obama’s Supreme Court choice, on campaign finance regulations.
Judge Sotomayor has ruled in several cases for outcomes favorable to proponents of campaign restrictions. And before she became a judge, she spent four years on the New York City Campaign Finance Board, which enforces election spending laws, and where, board minutes and other records obtained by The New York Times show, she took an active role.
“People who are First Amendment absolutists are not going to be thrilled with her positions in these cases,” said Richard L. Hasen, a Loyola Law School Los Angeles professor who specializes in election law. “But people who support reasonable regulation of the political system are going to be more in favor of the kind of positions she has taken.”
Several important cases about campaign finance regulations could eventually reach the Supreme Court, including a case challenging contribution limits on independent groups that run political advertisements and another in which the Republican National Committee has brought a fresh challenge to the ban on unregulated “soft money” in elections.
The constitutionality of campaign finance laws has been one of the hardest-fought issues at the Supreme Court in recent years, generating some of its highest-profile rulings.
In 2003, the court voted 5 to 4 to uphold the 2002 McCain-Feingold law, which banned soft money contributions not subject to donor limits to political parties for use in campaigns. But the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in 2006 and her replacement by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. created a new majority bloc that has struck down campaign regulations in several more recent cases.
Justice David H. Souter, whom Judge Sotomayor would succeed if confirmed, has been among the faction willing to uphold such laws. “Sotomayor’s replacement of Souter won’t change the balance on the court in this area so it means they won’t become more hostile to regulation as a result of this change,” said Richard Briffault, an election law specialist at Columbia Law School who has worked on issues related to the Campaign Finance Board. “This may be a good example of where this will be pretty close to a one-for-one substitution.”
Judge Sotomayor’s engagement with campaign finance regulations dates back to 1988, when Peter L. Zimroth, New York’s corporation counsel, said he recommended that Mayor Edward I. Koch appoint her to the city’s new Campaign Finance Board.
The board members, including Ms. Sotomayor, became pioneers in developing a voluntary program in which local candidates receive public matching money in exchange for accepting disclosure requirements and limits on contributions and spending.
Board minutes provide a glimpse: Ms. Sotomayor, then in private practice, grilled one politician over why his campaign reported receiving some cash contributions as checks, requested a study “on the ethnicity and sex” of program participants, and reviewed the Spanish translation of voter guides.
At other times, Ms. Sotomayor noted approvingly that the program appeared to be encouraging more challengers, and also warned that a certain proposed action “might be construed as a partisan move.” On rare occasions, she dissented from board votes, including a decision to penalize the 1989 mayoral campaign of David N. Dinkins over paperwork problems. The minutes do not say what her specific objections were.
Ms. Sotomayor resigned from the board when she became a federal judge in 1992. But the experience seems to have helped shape her views. In addition to her 1996 speech warning about the influence of money in politics which she wrote with Nicole Gordon, a former executive director of the Campaign Finance Board she went on to issue rulings in several cases that endorsed election regulations.
For example, as Mr. Hasen noted in a recent blog post, she upheld a law that forbids paying signature-gatherers by the number of people they get to sign petitions. She also upheld a law that prevented minor political parties from gaining official status on ballots.
That record is not without exception. In 2005, she voted to strike down the State of New York’s method of choosing judges, a ruling the Supreme Court overturned.
Still, after a panel of her colleagues upheld a Vermont campaign finance law that imposed strict contribution and spending limits on campaigns, she voted not to rehear the case. The Supreme Court later struck down the Vermont law.
Judge Sotomayor’s record on campaign finance regulations has not gone unnoticed. The Center for Competitive Politics, which opposes such limits, has noted her views with concern, declaring she is “not the Supreme Court nominee we wanted.”
But Democracy 21, which supports such regulations, argued that her “views are within the mainstream of the Court’s well-established First Amendment jurisprudence and consistent with the exercise of robust free speech rights.”
Itai Maytal contributed research.
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