KENTUCKY’S
KING
a relatively extreme response reserved only for dramatic legislation.
He also placed a call to Indiana
lawyer James Bopp Jr. Although
his office was 650 miles from
Capitol Hill, Bopp had cultivated
a substantial reputation in rightwing circles for his work on behalf
of Washington-based conservative
Christian organizations, including
the anti-abortion National Right
to Life Committee. In the 1970s,
many of these groups began injecting politics into their cultural
advocacy, which sparked investigations from the Federal Election
Commission. Bopp pioneered a
defense for these groups rooted in
the First Amendment, a traditional foundation of liberal advocacy.
Before McCain-Feingold had
even been voted on, McConnell
and Bopp founded the James Madison Center for Free Speech and
began plotting opposition to the
legislation if the filibuster failed.
In 1997, McConnell held the
line. Even though McCain and Feingold mustered 53 votes, McConnell’s filibuster forced a 60-vote
standard and killed the bill. But
five years later, with soft money up
500 percent over the past decade,
McCain and Feingold gathered 60
votes, and President George W.
HUFFINGTON
08.11.13
Bush signed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002.
Defeated on the Senate floor,
McConnell with Bopp’s aid went
straight to court, filing a lawsuit
against the FEC to challenge the
initial implementation of the bill —
a naked effort to overturn the law
in court and another tactic often
deployed by liberal lawyers thwarted by conservative policymakers.
They even garnered support from
ACLU heavyweight and corporate
lawyer Floyd Abrams. McConnell
told The New York Times that he
found all the criticism thrown his
way “exhilarating.”
“He was proactive,” Bopp says
of McConnell. “It took a year of
litigation. It got to the Supreme
Court. ... He would have meetings
with the five lawyers representing
him fairly regularly. He’s a lawyer,
you know. He can’t help himself. I
keep telling him he’s a politician,
not a litigator.”
McConnell lost his own case,
but within the decade, he had
transformed election law. Bopp
and the James Madison Center
kept filing First Amendment cases
on campaign finance, and in 2010,
their Supreme Court victory in
Citizens United v. FEC allowed
independent groups to spend unlimited sums from corporations
and wealthy donors on elections.
McConnell’s legal and ideological