Abstract
In Bluman v. FEC, the court held that foreign nationals could be prohibited from making even independent expenditures because such expenditures risked inappropriately influencing the choices made by American voters. The result in Bluman is correct, but the court’s reasoning is wrong. Foreign financing bans are constitutional not because foreign speech may “inappropriately” influence voters, but for the same reason all successful restrictions on political speech are constitutional: because of the risk they pose to the appearance or actuality of corrupting the conduct of public officials. The sense of indebtedness or ingratiation independent expenditures can induce in elected officials may be a contextually appropriate part of responsive self-government when done by domestic actors but has no place in the interactions between elected officials and foreign financiers and is well within the power of Congress to prevent.
Repository Citation
Lori A. Ringhand,
Contextualizing Corruption: Foreign Financing Bans and Campaign Finance Law
, 44 Cardozo Law Review 873
(2023),
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/fac_artchop/1601
Published online in Cardozo Law Review.