A key legal strategy of the antiabortion movement is dismantling campaign finance laws.

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Stephen Spaulding
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This piece by @maryrziegler is important.

Many do not know that one of the key legal strategies of the antiabortion movement is dismantling campaign finance laws. A key architect of Citizens United is General Counsel to National Right to Life.

nytimes.com
Opinion | Roe’s Death Will Change American Democracy
The anti-abortion movement has won its decades-long effort to undo Roe. Now what?
4:16 AM · Jun 26, 2022 from Chatham, MA

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/opinion/roe-v-wade-dobbs-democracy.html?referringSource=articleShare

No paywall
https://archive.ph/riSbW

The anti-abortion movement has long argued that reversing Roe v. Wade would strengthen American democracy. Roe, the argument goes, short-circuited a process of state-by-state debate and compromise, freezing the democratic process and imposing a single abortion solution on the nation. Undoing the constitutional right to abortion, then, is seen as a win for democracy — a first step in allowing each state to set its own policy.

The Supreme Court stresses this point in its opinion overturning Roe, going so far as to suggest that Roe is at the root of the polarization of American politics and the partisanship of our courts. Overturning it, the court argues, will move us a step closer to national sanity — or at least states can reach their own decisions and leave one another alone.

The problem with this argument is that history gives us no reason to believe it. Opinions about legal abortion were polarized before 1973, and Americans have held vastly different views about abortion since at least the 1960s. Nor did Roe short-circuit promising consensus solutions. The closest thing to a compromise — a model law promulgated by the American Law Institute in 1962 — was rejected by the anti-abortion movement as a denial of fetal rights and by many supporters of abortion rights as ineffective. Tensions have ratcheted up in the decades since for reasons having little to do with Roe, including the realignment of political parties around abortion and the rise of negative partisanship.

The dissolution of Roe will not make the tensions that preceded it disappear. Several states have already issued sweeping laws criminalizing abortion, while others have declared an intention to become sanctuaries for people seeking abortions. State leaders seem intent on influencing what happens outside their borders, encouraging or punishing travel for abortion. Anti-abortion leaders hope to ban abortion across the country through federal legislation or yet another Supreme Court decision, while abortion-rights groups are seeking to ensure access, circumvent criminal laws and wage battle in state courts.

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The Religious Right’s Crusade to Deregulate Political Spending

https://www.commoncause.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/unlimited-and-undisclosed.pdf

INTRODUCTION

National socially conservative Christian organizations (the “religious right”) have played a key role in the highly successful march to deregulate political spending in America over the past two decades, in close coordination with Republican political operatives and conservative corporate funders. Conservative movement leaders have envisioned – and spent millions to pursue – a world in which wealthy donors and corporations are free to anonymously spend unlimited sums to influence federal, state and local elections in order to advance their social and political agenda.

Leading the charge to dismantle the post-Watergate system of campaign finance reforms has been James Bopp, Jr., a lawyer and Republican Party leader working out of a small law firm in Terre Haute, Indiana on behalf of the National Right to Life Committee, Focus on the Family, National Organization for Marriage, and other conservative movement groups. Although few knew his name before the Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United decision in 2010, Bopp has proven to be a tenacious litigator with a steady stream of funding from conservative donors and the Republican Party.

“We had a 10-year plan to take all this down,” Bopp told the New York Times in the afterglow of the Citizens United de- cision. “If we do it right, I think we can pretty well dismantle the entire regulatory regime that is called campaign finance law. ... We have been awfully successful and we are not done yet.”1

Bopp scored his most recent victory in 2014 when the Supreme Court struck down the overall (“aggregate”) contribution limit any one donor could give to federal candidates, political parties and political action committees in McCutcheon v. FEC.2 As a result, one super-wealthy donor can now contribute as much as $3.6 million dollars directly to those entities in a single election cycle – up from the previous limit of $123,200.3 But it was the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, combined with a D.C. Circuit opinion Speechnow.org v. FEC, that opened the floodgates to more than a billion dollars in outside spending during the 2012 election cycle, much of it “dark” money from undisclosed donors.4 Greater amounts are expected in future elections, with even less transparency.

Emboldened by these victories, Bopp and conservative organizations have mounted a new round of challenges to state and federal campaign finance regulations, including contribution limits and disclosure – the last bastions of anti- corruption reform.

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