McConnell v. Federal Election Commission

“To an imagination of any scope the most far-reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas.”

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Path of the Law, 10 Harv. L. Rev. 457, 478 (1897).

I believe the statute before us is unconstitutional in virtually all of its particulars; it breaks faith with the fundamental principle — understood by our nation’s Founding Generation, inscribed in the First Amendment and repeatedly reaffirmed by the United States Supreme Court — that “debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.” New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 270,…