Stevens writes in "Five Chiefs" that his "extreme distaste for debates about campaign financing" -- born of reading his new colleagues' wrangling in the seminal 1976 case Buckley v. Valeo -- "never abated."
Because he arrived on the Court after the justices had already heard oral arguments in the Buckley case, he did not participate in his colleagues' deliberations. But he nevertheless felt obligated to keep up with the "seemingly endless parade of writings that my new colleagues circulated."
The end result, Stevens reminds us, was 294 pages of fractured opinions that, in his view, arbitrarily distinguished between contributions and expenditures, upholding federal limits on the former and striking down caps on the latter. Even under the majority's holding that spending money in elections is a form of political speech protected by the First Amendment, Stevens finds "nothing even arguably unfair about evenhanded rules that limit the amount of speech that can be voiced in certain times or places or by certain means."
Stevens notes in his book the prescience of Justice Byron White's prediction in his Buckley dissent that without limits on total expenditures, "campaign costs will inevitably and endlessly escalate."
A generation later, when the Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission held that any limits whatsoever on independent expenditures violated the First Amendment, it was Stevens' turn to deliver a jeremiad. For 20 minutes he spoke in open Court, railing against the five-member majority's overturning of the Court's decision just seven years earlier to uphold the same federal laws it now declared unconstitutional.
Justice John Paul Stevens Talks Citizens United
