Campaign Finance Reform

Campaign finance reform is the political effort in the United States to change the involvement of money in politics, primarily in political campaigns.

Although attempts to regulate campaign finance by legislation date back to 1867, the modern era of "campaign finance reform" in the United States begins with the passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) of 1971 and, more importantly, 1974 amendments to that Act. The 1971 FECA required candidates to disclose sources of campaign contributions and campaign expenditures. The 1974 Amendments essentially rewrote the Act from top to bottom. The 1974 Amendments placed statutory limits on contributions by individuals for the first time, and created the Federal Election Commission (FEC) as an independent enforcement agency. It provided for broad new disclosure requirements, and limited the amounts that candidates could spend on their campaigns, or that citizens could spend separate from candidate campaigns to promote their political views. Specifically, it attempted to restrict the influence of wealthy individuals by limiting individual donations to $1,000 and donations by political action committees (PACs) to $5,000. However, the Act's provisions limiting expenditures were struck down as unconstitutional in the 1976 Supreme Court decision Buckley v. Valeo.

The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002, also known as "McCain-Feingold", after its sponsors, is the most recent major federal law on campaign finance, the key provisions of which prohibited unregulated contributions (commonly referred to as "soft money") to national political parties and limited the use of corporate and union money to fund ads discussing political issues within 60 days of a general election or 30 days of a primary election. However, BCRA's provisions limiting corporate and union expenditures for issue advertising were narrowed in Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life, and later explicitly struck down on constitutional grounds in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

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