Republican party officials filed a federal lawsuit on Thursday seeking to overturn the ban on “soft money,” or unlimited campaign contributions, that is the primary law their presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain, was famous for.
As the Wall Street Journal reportstoday, the Republicans, after losing the presidency to a Democratic candidate who’d received an unprecedented amount of small donations, wants to shore up its own finances by allowing unlimited amounts of money to be donated by wealthy corporations, individuals and labor unions. The complaint, filed in DC District Court, claims the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (otherwise known as McCain-Feingold) violates the First Amendment to the US Constitution because its donation limits are not “unambiguously related to the campaign of a particular federal candidate” and that prevents Republican party operatives from soliciting for large, unlimited contributions to state candidates.
Although the Supreme Court has tinkered with parts of the law in the past, the core pillars of the McCain-Feingold law have survived several previous challenges.