WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed today to referee a challenge that seeks to undo a key provision of the landmark campaign-finance law that the Court upheld in 2003.
In Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life the justices will hear an appeal of a lower court decision that relaxed restrictions on mentioning candidates by name in issue ads run by corporations, labor unions and other special-interest groups during the height of a campaign.
The Court's action today means the case almost certainly will be argued in April and decided by July, well before the first presidential voting takes place in the Iowa caucuses in January 2008.
Issue ads are those that do not purport to influence an election, but rather focus attention on an issue their sponsors find important. The provision of the so-called McCain-Feingold law that prohibits mentioning a candidate applies in the 60 days before a general election and 30 days before a primary.
Its purpose was to end the common practice of circumventing limits on contributions in federal elections by airing ads that avoided expressly advocating a vote for or against someone while making clear a preference for or, more often, disapproval of one candidate.
Wisconsin Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, has been fighting the law since 2004, when it sought to run advertisements urging voters to contact Wisconsin Democratic Sens. Russ Feingold, up for re-election that year, and Herb Kohl and ask them not to hold up President Bush's judicial nominees.
Because Feingold was running, the ad was prohibited. Wisconsin Right to Life argued that it wasn't trying to influence an election and said the law restricted its constitutional right to petition the government.
The administration will be in the unusual position of defending the law against an attack from a group that backed the president's nominees.
The Supreme Court previously said the provision complies with First Amendment guarantees of free speech. The 2-1 ruling by a special court here in December does not so much challenge the high court holding as carve out exceptions to it.
Yet if the justices were to adopt the lower court's reasoning, they would "really blow a hole" in the provision, said Richard Hasen, an election-law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
"The purpose of the provision was to close a loophole that was allowing large amounts of corporate and union money to be spent on ads intended to influence federal elections," Hasen said. The court could reopen "that loophole for a large number of ads."
Direct corporate and union contributions are not allowed in federal campaigns. However, companies and unions may create political-action committees, subject to limits on what they can raise from contributors and spend on individual campaigns.
Like pending cases on abortion and race in public schools, the campaign-finance dispute is a high-profile case in which the Court could depart from earlier 5-4 rulings mainly owing to a change in its personnel.
Sandra Day O'Connor joined the four liberal justices in upholding large portions of McCain-Feingold in 2003. She has since retired and her replacement, Justice Samuel Alito, is considered more conservative.