Supreme Court refuses to get involved in Mississippi campaign ads

By The Associated Press

11.13.02

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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court isn't giving any help to states that want to collect more information about campaign spending.

The justices yesterday turned down a request by Mississippi and 20 other states that want to clarify what campaign speech is so states can more closely regulate it.

The Supreme Court is expected to get drawn into a much bigger campaign-finance case next year involving challenges to the new federal law.

Also yesterday, the Court refused to consider whether workers can be forced to pay for union-organizing activities in other workplaces against their wishes.

The issue has put the Bush administration at odds with the business community. The administration defended the mandatory dues and pressed the Court to stay out of a fight that involved grocery workers but could also affect millions of other employees.

Workers in 28 states can be forced to pay some dues, whether or not they join the union, under agreements negotiated with companies. The other 22 states have restrictions under right-to-work laws.

The Supreme Court has strictly limited the union agreements to protect nonmembers' free-speech and free-association rights. Workers cannot be forced to be full members, pay full dues or support a union's political activities, the Court has ruled.

The nonunion employees can be required to pay for a union's collective-bargaining work, however, so long as the money isn't spent on political and ideological purposes.

In the campaign-spending case, Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore said the Court should recognize state efforts to monitor election dollars, too.

That state has spent the past two years battling with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation's best-known business lobby. The group spent millions of dollars on television ads supportive of judicial candidates the chamber considered pro-business in 2000 in several states, including Mississippi.

An appeals court said that the U.S. Chamber did not have to reveal the cost of the ads, as part of the state's campaign-finance reporting law, because the ads did not include explicit words like "elect" or "vote for."

Moore told the justices that the decision "effectively opens and endorses a loophole that swallows the statute and submerges those legitimate state interests served by disclosure."

Jan Witold Baran, the Washington attorney for the Chamber, said the Court would have a chance to address First Amendment free-speech questions in the other, larger campaign-finance case. Considering the Mississippi challenge as well "would only add burden to what already will be a large and complex proceeding," Baran wrote in a filing.

Another 25 states have laws like Mississippi's: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Vermont. Many of those states urged the Court to review the case.

Mississippi had asked the Court to revisit its landmark 1976 ruling Buckley v. Valeo that struck down limits on campaign spending on grounds that the restrictions infringed on free speech.

Moore said the Court could not have envisioned then the widespread spending by independent groups.

The Chamber's ads were virtually identical to the candidates' ads. Under state law, the Chamber would have had to report how much the ads cost and where some of the money came from to fund them.

The campaign-spending case is Moore v. Chamber of Commerce of The United States of America, 02-305.

At issue in the union-dues case is a government decision to force grocery workers for chains based in California, Colorado and Michigan to pay for union organizing activities in other grocery markets.

The National Labor Relations Board determined that the employees benefit when salaries rise in their occupation, not just in the stores where they work. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld the decision, and the workers appealed to the Supreme Court.

"Organizing activity having such a straightforward economic purpose is not ideological in any relevant sense," Solicitor General Theodore Olson told the Court.

Glenn M. Taubman, the attorney for employees who contested the dues, said his clients have a First Amendment right to refrain from taking part in organizing activities. He asked the Court in a filing if it was unconstitutional to force nonmembers "to subsidize an ideological message (unionism in general and a specific union's in particular) that they deplore."

Olson said the real question is whether the labor board may craft rules for unions under the National Labor Relations Act. Most private industry employers' labor relations are subject to the law.

The Court has looked at many union-dues cases over the years. In 1991, the Court ruled, 5-4, that fees from non-union workers may be used for some activities indirectly related to collective bargaining as long as they benefit members of the local union.

The union-dues case at issue yesterday was Phillip Mulder v. National Labor Relations Board, 01-1867.

Previous

Mississippi asks high court to hear U.S. Chamber campaign-ads case
State argues that without some clarification by Supreme Court, other states' election-finance disclosure laws could be meaningless.  08.28.02

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