The campaign finance ruling: A nibbling court

What a shame that Justice Clarence Thomas' concurring opinion in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission wasn't the majority opinion.

In a 5-4 ruling announced Wednesday, the high court overturned aggregate limits on campaign donations. The court held that such restrictions — which effectively make the maximum allowable individual contributions to nine candidates legal but somehow corrupt to the 10th — “impose a special burden on broader participation in the democratic process” and thus “invalid under the First Amendment.”

“Those First Amendment rights are important regardless whether the individual is, on the one hand, a ‘lone pamphleteer or street corner orator in the Tom Paine mold' or is, on the other side, someone who spends ‘substantial amounts of money in order to communicate (his) political ideas through sophisticated' means,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for the majority.

The court, however, did not disturb limits on what individuals can donate to a single candidate or political parties and committees in a two-year election cycle.

Which disturbed Mr. Justice Thomas in his concurrence:

“The case represents yet another missed opportunity to right the course of our campaign finance jurisprudence by restoring a standard that is faithful to the First Amendment,” Thomas wrote. “Until we take that re-examination, we remain in a ‘halfway house' of our own design.”

And as we all should remember, with caution, “halfway” rights are not rights at all but conscriptors of freedom and liberty.