In Buckley v. Valeo, the first and most important of the campaign finance cases, the Supreme Court created a framework tha still guides analysis in this area. Buckley concerned a challenge to many of the 1974 amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act. This finding stated that no sufficient state interest justified limiting individual expenditures. This one small part of the discussion in Buckley has by itself doomed many reform proposals. In upholding individual contributions limitations, the Court said that Congress could somewhat burden political expression in the name of preventing "corruption and the appearance of corruption spawned by the real or imagined coercive influence of large financial contributions on candidates' positions and on their actions if elected to office."
The notion of corruption was dramatically changed in the Austin case. Instead of covering just the danger of a quid pro quo- the exchange of spending in an election for later support on legislation -corruption grew to include "the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumlated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public's support for the corporation's political ideas."
Disclosing the sources and amounts of funds used to finance federal elections is perhaps the most important of the FEC's duties. In fact, it would be virtually impossible for the Commission to effectively fulfill any of its other responsibilities without disclosure. Disclosure helps citizens evaluate the candidates running for federal office and enables them to monitor committe compliance with the election law.
The absence of effective enforcement machinery has plagued campaign finance law from the outset. Compliance with the Federal Corrupt Practices Act of 1925 was notoriously weak, at least in part because no public agency was given the authority, resources, and incentives to administer it. After the Watergate hearings uncovered serious campaign abuses in both parties, Congress passed amendments to the FECA that for the first time created an agency, the Federal Election Commission (FEC), mandated to enforce the law.
Foreign nationals are defined as a foreign principal. The term "foreign principal" includes any individual who is not a citizen of the United States, or any individual who is not lawfully admitted for permanent residence.
Simply stated, issue advocacy has come to mean political speech that may mention specific candidates or political parties BUT does not "expressly advocate" the election or defeat of a clearly identified federal candidate through the use of words such as "vote for," "oppose," "support," and the like. Political issue advocacy exploded into the public consciousness during the 1996 congressional and presidential elections. Organizations and interest groups saturated the local radio and television airwaves across the country with issue-oriented advertisements, with the stated purpose of shaping public opinion on selected policy matters.
We talk and write blithely of "PACs," but the term "political action committee" does not appear in federal statutes. PACs are simply a residual category: political committees other than those of political parties. But for one of these committees to quality for the "$5,000 per candidate per election" limit on contribution, it must be a "multicandidate committee." That is, it must recieve contributions from more than fifty people and contribute to at least five candidates for federal office. PACs, moreover, can be divided into two broad types depending on their organizational structure: the connected and the nonconnected. The connected are the PACs with parent organizations- corporations, for example. In sharp contrast are the nonconnected PACs, whose founders are an individual political entrepreneur, or a group of them. A PAC's purpose is basically to raise money in voluntary individual contributions for a seperate political fund from which to support the interests of the sponsoring organization with campaign contributions.
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