In a federal appeals court in Boston on Wednesday, free speech advocates sparred with the state of Maine and an allied nonprofit organization that want to cap unlimited contributions to super PACs and other big-money political groups.
The state of Maine and Equal Citizens, a nonprofit group founded by Harvard law professor and erstwhile presidential candidate Larry Lessig, are fighting to restore a Maine law capping individual contributions to certain big-spending political groups, such as super PACs, at $5,000.
They’re hoping to take their case all the way to the Supreme Court.
But they faced stiff resistance Wednesday from opponents who argue that spending by outside political groups — groups that raise and spend money to influence elections but are not allowed to coordinate directly with candidates — is a protected form of political speech.
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Two super PACs, Dinner Table Action and For Our Future, sued Maine state election officials — successfully — to stop the law, which Maine voters overwhelmingly approved in 2024, from going into effect.
“The American people have a First Amendment right to assemble and to associate, to engage in political speech, and particularly election-related speech, free of infringement from many laws,” Charles “Chip” Miller, a senior attorney at the Institute for Free Speech, which is representing the super PACs, said Wednesday. “That is what we’re here talking about today. That’s what independent expenditures are. It’s the association of individuals to get together to speak.”
But Americans across the political spectrum overwhelmingly believe there is too much money in U.S. politics, according to recent polling by Politico, Pew Research Center and others.
The 2026 midterm election is expected to be the most expensive non-presidential cycle on record, with well-funded super PACs — including the president’s MAGA Inc. and those controlled by cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence and sports-betting industries — poised to play a major role in shaping the election landscape.
Maine is one of several states that’s attempted to limit the amount of money flowing into their elections, which has exploded since 2010, when the Supreme Court greenlit unlimited spending by outside groups in its Citizens United v. FEC decision.
“This case presents a single question: When the people of Maine decided, by the largest vote in the state’s 206-year history, that unlimited super PAC contributions were corrupting their elections, did the First Amendment leave them powerless? It did not,” Neal Katyal, a partner at Milbank LLP, who successfully argued against President Donald Trump’s tariffs at the Supreme Court earlier this year, said during oral arguments Wednesday.
Lessig previously told the Maine Morning Star he had expected a legal challenge, and Equal Citizens joined the case to defend the contribution limits.
Lessig’s stated goal is to get the case to the Supreme Court, which he argues hasn’t grappled directly with the constitutionality of unlimited political contributions.
A few months after the Citizens United decision, a federal appeals court in D.C. applied the Supreme Court ruling to another case called SpeechNow.org v. FEC. The court ruled then that contribution limits, not just spending limits, were lawful, as did other appeals courts — and this is the precedent Maine and Equal Citizens are targeting.
“The strategy is to get this case to the Supreme Court with the First Circuit coming into contradiction with the precedents of other Circuits including the Second, Fifth, Seventh, Ninth, Tenth — and, most importantly, the DC Circuit,” Maia Cook, Equal Citizens’ executive director, wrote in a statement to NOTUS.
In a written statement to NOTUS ahead of oral argument, Miller said the Maine ballot measure “strikes at the heart of the First Amendment by severely limiting political speech.”
“There is no legitimate government interest in limiting contributions to groups that make only independent expenditures,” Miller wrote.
The odds that the case makes it to the Supreme Court would rise if the federal appeals court sides with Maine and Equal Citizens, which would create a tantalizing “circuit split” for the court.
Last July, a U.S. magistrate judge stopped Maine from enforcing the law, which she called “unconstitutional on its face.”
The federal appeals court is expected to rule in November or December, although there’s no official timeline for releasing the decision.
Even if the case gets to the Supreme Court, however, Maine faces an uphill battle.
Conservative justices have sympathized with arguments that super PACs erode the power of political parties, in part fueling their decision last month to strike down coordination limits between political party committees and candidates.
But that doesn’t mean justices are willing to limit super PACs’ ability to spend as much money as they want to advocate for or against political candidates.
“[D]onors can and do send their funds to Super PACs and other outside groups that have a First Amendment right to receive and spend unlimited money to support their independent political speech,” conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the opinion last month.
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