Campaign Finance Battle Heading to Court
By ALISON MITCHELL
ASHINGTON, March 21 — Kenneth W. Starr, the former independent counsel whose investigation led to President Bill Clinton's impeachment, and Floyd Abrams, a First Amendment lawyer who took on the Nixon administration, will lead the legal challenge to the campaign finance law just passed by Congress.
Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who plans to be the lead plaintiff in the case, announced at a news conference today that the two men would head a group of lawyers representing him in the challenge. The group also includes experts in election and campaign law as well as Kathleen M. Sullivan, the dean of Stanford Law School.
"This is a mission to preserve the fundamental constitutional freedom of all Americans to fully participate in our democracy," said Mr. McConnell, a longtime opponent of the effort to limit money in politics.
The lawyers arrayed at Mr. McConnell's side seemed slightly amused at what they acknowledged to be an odd ideological alliance.
Mr. Abrams, who was co-counsel for The New York Times when the Nixon administration tried to stop the newspaper from publishing excerpts of the Pentagon papers, said, "I'm delighted to be here in rather unaccustomed company."
Citing the adage that politics makes strange bedfellows, he added, "There are no strange bedfellows in defense of the First Amendment."
Mr. Starr called the challenge to the finance measure "a great constitutional issue, one of the most important of the past generation."
Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who is a chief sponsor of the measure, said, "They are going to need all the help they can get." He added, "We will be legally equipped to respond."
Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the majority leader and a strong supporter of the measure, acknowledged that he could not predict what the courts would do.
"We're making our best effort to pass a law that is constitutionally viable," Mr. Daschle said.
The campaign finance overhaul approved by the Senate on Wednesday after a seven-year struggle is the most comprehensive change in the campaign finance law since the Watergate era. President Bush said that the measure presented some "legitimate constitutional questions" but that he would still sign it into law.
The heart of the bill is a ban on the large unlimited contributions to the national political parties known as soft money. It would also prevent outside groups from using soft money to pay for broadcast commercials that are thinly disguised campaign commercials 60 days before an election and 30 days before a primary.
The measure, for the first time since 1974, loosens the caps on more strictly regulated campaign contributions known as hard money. For example, individuals would be allowed to contribute $2,000 per election to a federal candidate instead of the current $1,000 limit. The 1974 campaign law came under scrutiny by the Supreme Court in a case brought by a diverse group of challengers. The court left standing the limits on contributions to individual candidates but held mandatory spending limits unconstitutional.
Anticipating a new court battle, Congress authorized an expedited court review with any challenge heard first by a three-judge federal panel in the District of Columbia Circuit, with appeals directly to the Supreme Court. Although the law will not take effect until the day after the November elections, the lawyers said they believed they would have standing to begin the challenge as soon as President Bush signed the bill.
The lawyers today turned much of their fire on the effort to restrict broadcast commercials by outside groups in the periods before elections if they mention federal candidates. Mr. Abrams called this a "threat to core First Amendment values" and asked if it served the public to "limit speech at the time it matters most" before elections.
Mr. Starr also said principles of federalism were raised because the bill would regulate political behavior on both the state and local level as well as the national level.
Mr. McConnell said the one part of the bill he would not challenge was the increase in limits on hard money donations. The other lawyers who will be working for Mr. McConnell are James Bopp Jr., who has argued that limiting campaign donations violates the First Amendment; Jan Baran, a Washington election lawyer; and Bobby R. Burchfield, who heads the litigation group at Covington & Burling, a firm that represented the challengers to the 1974 campaign regulations.
Supporters of the measure are putting together their legal team, too, and say it will include among others Seth Waxman, a solicitor general in the Clinton administration, and Bert Neuborne, former legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union.
More than a dozen conservatives in the House said in a statement today that they were "deeply disappointed" that Mr. Bush had decided to sign the bill.