Campaign-finance Laws

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7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Indiana Right to Life Victory Fund v. Diego Morales

Case No.: 22-1562

Officials: Easterbrook, Scudder, and Lee, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Campaign-finance Laws

Political action committees accept campaign contributions from donors and spend that money to support or oppose political candidates, parties, or ballot initiatives. An independent-expenditure PAC—commonly called a “super PAC”—is a special kind of PAC that spends its money a little differently than most PACs. Unlike the others, independent-expenditure PACs do not give money directly to candidates, party committees, or ballot-initiative movements. Rather, they spend the money themselves to advocate for or against candidates, parties, or initiatives.

Indiana Right to Life Victory Fund wants to operate as an independent-expenditure PAC in Indiana, but it fears that the state’s Election Code does not allow it to accept donations from corporations (or perhaps that there would be a cap on how much those corporations could donate). The Fund believes this restriction violates its First Amendment rights, so it and a private company have come to federal court seeking to prevent Indiana from enforcing its campaign-finance laws to limit or ban corporate contributions to independent-expenditure PACs. The wrinkle is that Indiana’s election officials say they have no intent to enforce their laws that way and, more to the point, do not even think their laws could be enforced that way either under the plain text of the Election Code or without violating the First Amendment.

The Seventh Circuit denied the motion as “unnecessary” and “improper.”  Nothing about Morales becoming Secretary of State calls jurisdiction into question. Nor does it materially alter anything about the issues. The Fund’s motion seeks one of two things, neither of which would be an appropriate use of judicial notice. It may attempt to define the likelihood that Secretary Morales will enforce the Election Code or it might attempt to highlight what it sees as a gap in the evidentiary record—that Secretary Morales has yet to make a statement regarding state regulation of independent-expenditure PACs. Judicial notice is only permitted for adjudicative facts “not subject to reasonable dispute.”

Decided 04/26/23

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