(Slip Opinion) OCTOBER TERM, 1999 1 Syllabus NOTE: Where it is feasible, a syllabus (headnote) will be released, as is being done in connection with this case, at the time the opinion is issued. The syllabus constitutes no part of the opinion of the Court but has been prepared by the Reporter of Decisions for the convenience of the reader. See United States v. Detroit Timber & Lumber Co., 200 U. S. 321, 337. SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES Syllabus NIXON, ATTORNEY GENERAL OF MISSOURI, ET AL. v. SHRINK MISSOURI GOVERNMENT PAC ET AL. CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT No. 98­963. Argued October 5, 1999- Decided January 24, 2000 Respondents Shrink Missouri Government PAC, a political action committee, and Zev David Fredman, a candidate for the 1998 Repub- lican nomination for Missouri state auditor, filed suit, alleging that a Missouri statute imposing limits ranging from $275 to $1,075 on con- tributions to candidates for state office violated their First and Four- teenth Amendment rights. Shrink Missouri gave Fredman $1,025 in 1997, and $50 in 1998, and represented that, without the statutory limitation, it would contribute more. Fredman alleged he could cam- paign effectively only with more generous contributions than the statute allowed. On cross-motions for summary judgment, the Dis- trict Court sustained the statute. Applying Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U. S. 1 (per curiam), the court found adequate support for the law in the proposition that large contributions raise suspicions of influence ped- dling tending to undermine citizens' confidence in government integ- rity. The court rejected respondents' contention that inflation since Buckley's approval of a federal $1,000 restriction meant that the state limit of $1,075 for a statewide office could not be constitutional today. In reversing, the Eighth Circuit found that Buckley had ar- ticulated and applied a strict scrutiny standard of review, and held that Missouri had to demonstrate that it had a compelling interest and that the contribution limits at issue were narrowly drawn to serve that interest. Treating Missouri's claim of a compelling inter- est in avoiding the corruption or the perception of corruption caused by candidates' acceptance of large campaign contributions as insuffi- cient by itself to satisfy strict scrutiny, the court required demonstra- ble evidence that genuine problems resulted from contributions in amounts greater than the statutory limits. It ruled that the State's 2 NIXON v. SHRINK MISSOURI GOVERNMENT PAC Syllabus evidence was inadequate for this purpose. Held: Buckley is authority for comparable state limits on contributions to state political candidates, and those limits need not be pegged to the precise dollar amounts approved in Buckley. Pp. 5­18. (a) The Buckley Court held, inter alia, that a Federal Election Campaign Act provision placing a $1,000 annual ceiling on independ- ent expenditures linked to specific candidates for federal office in- fringed speech and association guarantees of the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth, but upheld other provisions limiting contributions by individuals to any single candi- date to $1,000 per election. P. 5. (b) In addressing the speech claim, the Buckley Court explicitly rejected both intermediate scrutiny for communicative action, see United States v. O'Brien, 391 U. S. 367, and the similar standard ap- plicable to merely time, place, and manner restrictions, see, e.g., Ad- derley v. Florida, 385 U. S. 39, and instead referred generally to "the exacting scrutiny required by the First Amendment," 424 U. S., at 16. The Court then drew a line between expenditures and contributions, treating expenditure restrictions as direct restraints on speech, id., at 19, but saying, in effect, that limiting contributions left communica- tion significantly unimpaired, id., at 20­21. The Court flagged a similar difference between the impacts of expenditure and contribu- tion limits on association rights, id., at 22; see also id., at 28, and later made that distinction explicit, e.g., Federal Election Comm'n v. Massachusetts Citizens for Life, Inc., 479 U. S. 238, 259­260. Thus, under Buckley's standard of scrutiny, a contribution limit involving significant interference with associational rights could survive if the Government demonstrated that regulating contributions was a means "closely drawn" to match a "sufficiently important interest," 424 U. S, at 25, though the dollar amount of the limit need not be "fine tun[ed]," id., at 30. While Buckley did not attempt to parse dis- tinctions between the speech and associational standards of scrutiny for contribution limits, the Court made clear that such restrictions bore more heavily on associational rights than on speech rights, and thus proceeded on the understanding that a contribution limitation surviving a claim of associational abridgement would survive a speech challenge as well. The Court found the prevention of corrup- tion and the appearance of corruption to be a constitutionally suffi- cient justification for the contribution limits at issue. Id., at 25­28. Pp. 5­10. (c) In defending its statute, Missouri espouses those same interests of preventing corruption and the appearance of it. Even without Buckley, there would be no serious question about the legitimacy of these interests, which underlie bribery and antigratuity statutes. Cite as: 528 U. S. ____ (2000) 3 Syllabus Rather, respondents take the State to task for failing to justify the in- vocation of those interests with empirical evidence of actually corrupt practices or of a perception among Missouri voters that unrestricted contributions must have been exerting a covertly corrosive influence. The state statute is not void, however, for want of evidence. The quantum of empirical evidence needed to satisfy heightened judicial scrutiny of legislative judgments will vary up or down with the nov- elty and plausibility of the justification raised. Buckley demonstrates that the dangers of large, corrupt contributions and the suspicion that large contributions are corrupt are neither novel nor implausi- ble. See 424 U. S., at 27, and n. 28. Respondents are wrong in ar- guing that this Court has "supplemented" its Buckley holding with a new requirement that governments enacting contribution limits must demonstrate that the recited harms are real, not merely conjectural, a contention for which respondents rely principally on Colorado Repub- lican Federal Campaign Comm. v. Federal Election Comm'n, 518 U. S. 604. This Court has never accepted mere conjecture as adequate to carry a First Amendment burden, and Colorado Republican deals not with a government's burden to justify contribution limits, but with lim- its on independent expenditures by political parties, which the principal opinion expressly distinguished from contribution limits. Id., at 615­ 618. In any event, this case does not present a close call requiring fur- ther definition of whatever the State's evidentiary obligation may be. Although the record does not show that the Missouri Legislature re- lied on the evidence and findings accepted in Buckley, the evidence introduced by respondents or cited by the lower courts in this action and a prior case involving a related ballot initiative is enough to show that the substantiation of the congressional concerns reflected in Buckley has its counterpart in support of the Missouri law. Moreo- ver, although majority votes do not, as such, defeat First Amendment protections, the statewide vote adopting the initiative attested to the public perception that contribution limits are necessary to combat corruption and the appearance thereof. A more extensive evidentiary documentation might be necessary if petitioners had made any showing of their own to cast doubt on the apparent implications of Buckley's evidence and the record here. However, the nearest they come to challenging these conclusions is their invocation of academic studies that are contradicted by other studies. Pp. 10­15. (d) There is no support for respondents' various arguments that the Missouri limitations are so different in kind from those sustained in Buckley as to raise essentially a new issue about the adequacy of the Missouri statute's tailoring to serve its purposes. Here, as in Buckley, supra, at 21, there is no indication that those limits have had any dramatic adverse effect on the funding of campaigns and po- 4 NIXON v. SHRINK MISSOURI GOVERNMENT PAC Syllabus litical associations, and thus there is no showing that the limitations prevented candidates from amassing the resources necessary for ef- fective advocacy. Indeed, the District Court found that since the Mis- souri limits became effective, candidates for state office have been able to raise funds sufficient to run effective campaigns, and that candidates are still able to amass impressive campaign war chests. The plausibility of these conclusions is buttressed by petitioners' evi- dence that in the last election before the contributions became effec- tive, 97.62 percent of all contributors to candidates for state auditor made contributions of $2,000 or less. Even assuming that the contri- bution limits affected respondent Fredman's ability to wage a com- petitive campaign, a showing of one affected individual does not point up a system of suppressed political advocacy that would be unconsti- tutional under Buckley. The District Court's conclusions and the supporting evidence also suffice to answer respondents' variant claim that the Missouri limits today differ in kind from Buckley's owing to inflation since that case was decided. Respondents' assumption that Buckley set a minimum constitutional threshold for contribution lim- its, which in dollars adjusted for loss of purchasing power are now well above the lines drawn by Missouri, is a fundamental misunder- standing of that case. The Court there specifically rejected the con- tention that $1,000, or any other amount, was a constitutional mini- mum, and instead asked whether the contribution limitation was so low as to impede the ability of candidates to amass the resources nec- essary for effective advocacy. 424 U. S., at 21. Such being the test, the issue in subsequent cases cannot be truncated to a narrow ques- tion about the power of the dollar. Pp. 15­18. 161 F. 3d 519, reversed and remanded. SOUTER, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which REHNQUIST, C. J., and STEVENS, O'CONNOR, GINSBURG, and BREYER, JJ., joined. STEVENS, J., filed a concurring opinion. BREYER, J., filed a concurring opinion, in which GINSBURG, J., joined. KENNEDY, J., filed a dissenting opinion. THOMAS, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which SCALIA, J., joined. Cite as: 528 U. S. ____ (2000) 1 Opinion of the Court NOTICE: This opinion is subject to formal revision before publication in the preliminary print of the United States Reports. Readers are requested to notify the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Court of the United States, Wash- ington, D. C. 20543, of any typographical or other formal errors, in order that corrections may be made before the preliminary print goes to press. SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES _________________ No. 98­963 _________________ JEREMIAH W. (JAY) NIXON, ATTORNEY GENERAL OF MISSOURI, ET AL., PETITIONERS v. SHRINK MISSOURI GOVERNMENT PAC ET AL. ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT [January 24, 2000] JUSTICE SOUTER delivered the opinion of the Court. The principal issues in this case are whe ther Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U. S. 1 (1976) (per curiam), is authority for state limits on contributions to state political candidates and whether the federal limits approved in Buckley, with or without adjustment for inflation, define the scope of pe r- missible state limitations today. We hold Buckley to be authority for comparable state regulation, which need not be pegged to Buckley's dollars. I In 1994, the Legislature of Missouri enacted Senate Bill 650 (SB650) to restrict the permissible amounts of con- tributions to candidates for state office. Mo. Rev. Stat. §130.032 (1994). Before the statute became effective, however, Missouri voters approved a ballot initiative with even stricter contribution limits, effective immediately. The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit then held the initiative's contribution limits unconstit u- tional under the First Amendment, Carver v. Nixon, 72 F. 3d 633, 645 (CA8 1995), cert. denied, 518 U. S. 1033 2 NIXON v. SHRINK MISSOURI GOVERNMENT PAC Opinion of the Court (1996), with the upshot that the previously dormant 1994 statute took effect. Shrink Missouri Government PAC v. Adams, 161 F. 3d 519, 520 (CA8 1998). As amended in 1997, that statute imposes contribution limits ranging from $250 to a $1,000, depending on spec i- fied state office or size of constituency. See Mo. Rev. Stat. §130.032.1 (1998 Cum. Supp.); 161 F. 3d, at 520. The particular provision challenged here reads that "[t]o elect an individual to the office of governor, lie u- tenant governor, secretary of state, state treasurer, state auditor or attorney general, [[t]he amount of contributions made by or accepted from any person other than the candidate in any one election shall not exceed] one thousand dollars." Mo. Rev. Stat. §130.032.1(1) (1998 Cum. Supp.). The statutory dollar amounts are baselines for an adjus t- ment each even-numbered year, to be made "by multipl y- ing the base year amount by the cumulative consumer price index . . . and rounded to the nearest twenty-five- dollar amount, for all years since January 1, 1995." §130.032.2. When this suit was filed, the limits ranged from a high of $1,075 for contributions to candidates for statewide office (including state auditor) and for any office where the population exceeded 250,000, down to $275 for contributions to candidates for state representative or for any office for which there were fewer than 100,000 people represented. 161 F. 3d, at 520; App. 37. Respondents Shrink Missouri Government PAC, a political action committee, and Zev David Fredman, a candidate for the 1998 Republican nomination for state auditor, sought to enjoin enforcement of the contribution statute1 as violating their First and Fourteenth Amend- - - - - - - 1 Respondents sued members of the Missouri Ethics Commission, the Missouri attorney general, and the St. Louis County prosecuting Cite as: 528 U. S. ____ (2000) 3 Opinion of the Court ment rights (presumably those of free speech, association, and equal protection, although the complaint did not so state). Shrink Missouri gave $1,025 to Fredman's cand i- date committee in 1997, and another $50 in 1998. Shrink Missouri represented that, without the limitation, it would contribute more to the Fredman campaign. Fredman alleged he could campaign effectively o