Frank v. City of Akron
| Citation | 290 F.3d 813 |
| Decision Date | 22 May 2002 |
| Docket Number | No. 00-3070.,No. 00-3050.,00-3050.,00-3070. |
| Parties | John V. FRANK; Marco Sommerville; John W. Valle; Robert G. Konstand; Gerald Holland; Nancy Heslop; Charles Walker, Plaintiffs-Appellees/Cross-Appellants, v. CITY OF AKRON, Defendant-Appellee, Bruce Kilby; Mike Parsons; Patricia Longville; Gregory D. Coleridge; the Yes on 11 Campaign, Intervenors-Appellants/Cross-Appellees. |
| Court | United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (6th Circuit) |
Robert M. Gippin (argued and briefed), Karen Kelly Grasso (briefed), Thompson Hine, Cleveland, OH, for Plaintiffs-Appellees/Cross-Appellants.
Cheri B. Cunningham (argued and briefed), Max Rothal (briefed), City of Akron, Department of Law, Akron, OH, for Defendant-Appellee.
Brian J. Williams (argued and briefed), Akron, OH, Warner D. Mendenhall (briefed), Law Office of Warner Mendenhall, Akron, OH, for Intervenors-Appellants/Cross-Appellees.
Before MERRITT, CLAY, and GILMAN, Circuit Judges.
MERRITT, J., delivered the opinion of the court, in which CLAY, J., joined. GILMAN, J. (pp. 819-22), delivered a separate opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part.
This case concerns the constitutionality of a campaign finance reform amendment to the City of Akron, Ohio, charter passed by Akron voters in a city-wide referendum. Plaintiffs are a group of city council members and voters who challenge the charter amendment on First Amendment grounds. The district court held that three of the four campaign contribution limitations and regulations were unconstitutional. We believe they are all valid.
The City of Akron is a home-rule municipal corporation governing approximately 217,000 citizens. The municipal government is composed of an elected Mayor, three elected at-large council members and ten elected ward council members. The Mayor and the at-large council members serve four year terms, and the ward council members serve two-year terms.
In the fall of 1998, intervening defendants Greg Coleridge, Mike Parsons, Patty Longville, Bruce Kilby, and the Yes on 11 Campaign started a grass roots effort to amend the City of Akron charter to place limitations on the financing of municipal elections. On November 3, 1998, the initiative known as "Issue 11" was placed on the election ballot and passed with 68% of the vote. These reforms were designed to stop businessmen and other donors from using campaign contributions to buy city contracts — a practice said to be demonstrated by a study correlating campaign contributions to the contract awards of the city council — and other forms of influence over the council's decisions.
In December, 1998, plaintiffs, who include one former council member, two current council members, and three active political contributors, filed suit to challenge the charter amendment on First Amendment and other grounds. Before us on appeal are four specific provisions: non-cash campaign contribution limits of $100 for ward council members and $300 for at-large council members and the Mayor, a cash campaign contribution limit of $25, a home address public disclosure requirement for all contributors, and an employer identification requirement for contributors who give $50 or more. The district court granted summary judgment in favor of the plaintiffs on the first three provisions, holding that they violated the plaintiffs' First Amendment right to association, but denied summary judgment on the employer identification requirement.
The intervenors appealed the district court's grant of summary judgment, and plaintiffs cross-appealed the district court's denial of summary judgment as to the employer identification requirement. The City of Akron, formerly the defendants, joined the plaintiffs on appeal and filed a brief in support of their position.
Before addressing the merits of the plaintiffs' claims, we must first address the preliminary issue of standing. The intervenors claim that the plaintiffs have failed to show an injury in fact, or a personal stake in the case. As the district court correctly noted, however, where "plaintiffs allege an intention to engage in a course of conduct arguably affected by the statute, courts have found standing to challenge the statute even absent a specific threat of enforcement." United Food & Commercial Workers International Union v. IBP, Inc., 857 F.2d 422, 428 (8th Cir.1988). Here, the plaintiffs, as potential candidates and contributors, clearly intend to receive and contribute money in excess of the charter amendment limitations, and therefore have standing.
Section D provides:
No candidate for Mayor or At Large Council shall accept or solicit, as a noncash monetary (i.e. checks, money orders, credit cards) or in-kind campaign contribution or loan, more than $300 from any person, campaign committee, political party, or political action committee. No candidate for a Council Ward position shall accept or solicit, as a noncash monetary or in-kind contribution or loan, more than $100 from any person, campaign committee, political party, or political action committee. No person, political action committee, political party, or political campaign shall contribute funds or in-kind contributions in excess of said amounts. Contributions from the candidate and labor of volunteers are exempt from these provisions.
In contesting this provision, the primary right asserted by the plaintiffs is the First Amendment right to association. As explained in Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, 96 S.Ct. 612, 46 L.Ed.2d 659 (1976), contribution restrictions bear more heavily on the right to association than on the freedom to speak. Id. at 24-25, 96 S.Ct. 612. As a result, "a contribution limitation surviving a claim of associational abridgement would survive a speech challenge as well." Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Govt. PAC, 528 U.S. 377, 120 S.Ct. 897, 904-5, 145 L.Ed.2d 886 (2000). While not clearly defining the appropriate level of scrutiny as intermediate or strict, the Supreme Court in Shrink summarized the Buckley standard as follows:
... a contribution limit involving `significant interference' with associational rights, could survive if the Government demonstrated that contribution regulation was `closely drawn' to match a `sufficiently important interest,' though the dollar amount of the limit need not be `fine tun[ed],'
Id. at 904 (quoting Buckley at 25, 30, 96 S.Ct. 612)(internal citations omitted). The Buckley and Shrink cases are not designed to stop legislation to clean up the political corruption said to be caused in recent years by large campaign contributions to elected officials and political parties. It is not the function of the courts to take sides in partisan politics or partisan arguments about campaign finance reforms. It is the court's function to interpret the Constitution which contains no explicit provisions concerning campaign finance or insuring that a particular group may dominate democratic government because of its wealth.
On the surface, it is difficult to see how a restriction on political contributions to a hundred to three hundred dollars in a local election could significantly interfere with a donor's ability to "associate" with a particular political candidate. Limiting the amount of one's contribution does not perceptibly decrease the degree of association or restrict the contributor's ability to associate with the candidate of his choice. Cf. Buckley, 424 U.S. at 21, 96 S.Ct. 612 (). By limiting the amount that an individual may contribute to a campaign, the charter amendment does not foreclose that individual from freely associating himself with a candidate or participating personally in the campaign in any other way, including making expenditures on behalf of the candidate with whom he wishes to associate. See Buckley, 424 U.S. at 22, 96 S.Ct. 612 (). Money buys many of the good things in life, but no one has cited any constitutional history suggesting that money is supposed to be the milk of politics or that large political contributions are a necessary ingredient of representative government protected by the Constitution. Constitutional history does not support the idea that laissez faire economics is embodied in the First Amendment to assure the right to make large campaign contributions. As Holmes noted in his Lochner dissent:
The 14th Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statistics.... [A] Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the state or of laissez faire. It is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar, or novel, or even shocking, ought not to conclude judgment upon the question of whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States.
Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, 75-76, 25 S.Ct. 539, 49 L.Ed. 937 (1905)(Holmes, J., dissenting).
Our inquiry does not end here, however, because in Buckley and Shrink, the Supreme Court broadly defined an individual's right of association to include the ancillary right of the candidate to "amas[s] the resources necessary for effective advocacy." Shrink, 120 S.Ct. at 909 (quoting Buckley, 424 U.S. at 21, 96 S.Ct. 612). Thus, the Supreme Court would find an unconstitutional infringement of an individual's right of political association where "the contribution limit was so radical in effect as to render political association ineffective, drive the sound of the...
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