WASHINGTON — Television ads promoting movies are not the normal business of politics or the courts, but they are this month because conservative activists are seeking a wide audience for "Hillary: The Movie."
David N. Bossie, who made a name for himself as a relentless investigator of the Clintons during the 1990s, has released a 90-minute documentary on the New York senator. His targets include not just her but the campaign-funding regulatory law known as McCain-Feingold, one of the signal legislative accomplishments of another presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
Bossie's group is challenging the law's limits on its efforts to promote the movie and has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The litigation underscores the difficulty of drawing lines when money, politics and free-speech principles clash.
"Hillary: The Movie" includes a series of interviews with Clinton critics, including Ann Coulter, Newt Gingrich and Dick Morris. "If you want to hear about the Clinton scandals of the past and present, you have it here!" Citizens United, Bossie's group, says on its website.
The nonprofit corporation is free to promote its movie and sell DVDs on its website. But one provision of McCain-Feingold makes it illegal to use corporate or union money for "any broadcast, cable or satellite communication" if it "refers to a clearly identified candidate for federal office" within 30 days of a primary election or a convention or within 60 days of a general election. That "blackout period," as it is known, has covered California and much of the nation for the last month as the primary elections were pending.
McCain and other sponsors of the bill wanted to stop the slew of corporate-funded broadcast ads on the eve of an election.
For more than a century, corporations have been barred from spending money to elect or defeat federal candidates. In the 1980s, however, the federal rules freed corporations and other groups to run "issue ads." In short order, these ads evolved into thinly veiled attacks that mocked a candidate's stand on an issue and urged viewers and the listeners to "send a message" to Sen. Smith or Rep. Jones.
The McCain-Feingold Act, which went into effect in 2002, was written broadly to bar such election-eve ads. It covered nonprofit corporations as well as moneymaking firms. And it was triggered by the mere mention of the candidate's name.
That posed an obvious problem for Bossie and his group:
