Bipartisan Lawsuit Targets Super PACS

The lawsuit, filed in DC federal court earlier this month on behalf of a plaintiff group that includes members of Congress from both parties, seeks to reverse a 2010 appeals court ruling that essentially created super PACs. That case, SpeechNow.org v. FEC  – which looked to the Citizens United precedent – held that federal law limiting individual PAC contributions to $5,000 didn’t apply to PACs making so-called “independent expenditures.” The DC lawsuit is backed by an impressive coalition of academics and First Amendment lawyers, including Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, Albert Alschuler of the University of Chicago Law School, Norman Eisen, who served as chief ethics counsel to President Barack Obama and University of Minnesota law school professor Richard Painter, who is a former chief ethics counsel to President George W. Bush. The plaintiff legal team includes the lead counsel to the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, who acknowledges this case is an uphill battle but notes that Citizens United was also a long shot and ended up fundamentally changing the rules.