Brian Boyle
speaker
34 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 30 Jan
Brian Boyle’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, so today is the 58th anniversary of a case called Buckley versus Vallejo, which was decided by the Supreme Court back in 1976.
And as your listeners might not know anything about that case, if I could, I could just tell you, this is the case where the Supreme Court, really for the first time in American history, took over campaign finance as a policy area.
For the first, honestly, 200 years of American history,
the rules about how money flows through elections could be decided by the American people.
So if the American people were concerned about the way that that was happening and how it might be interfering with their sense of being represented by the people that they're trying to elect,
They had the ability to set some guardrails.
But then in 1976, the Supreme Court basically stepped in and really took that whole set of decisions and gave it over to the federal judiciary.
And that's where it's really lived for the past 50 years.
Yeah, so the case was about a federal law called the Federal Election Campaign Act.
And this was a law that had been passed by Congress actually on a cross-partisan basis and signed into law by President Ford.
And it was around concerns about how money Congress did some investigations and they felt that money was really influencing the policies that we're getting on the agenda.
And they were hearing from their constituents that they were concerned about how money was really severing the connection
between the people and the folks that were supposed to be serving their interests in DC.
And so Congress passed a set of comprehensive laws that were really meant to set some guardrails on that.
Now, if I could just take a step back and say,
The wisdom of those laws and whether they were good policy or not, I think, is a separate question from whether or not it was really the court's job to step in and say, actually, no, we're going to sort of take over and take the power away from the states and the American people to decide what laws we want in this area.
Yeah, so as you mentioned, it was James Buckley who was the brother of Bill Buckley.
He had run for the U.S.
Senate.
And, you know, I think the reason why the case is so important, why the anniversary is so important for your listeners to know about is that
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