Montanans for Community Development v. Jeffrey A. Mangan, et al.

In Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976), this Court held that the First Amendment allows government to impose political-committee (“PAC”) status, with its entity-based burdens, only on “organizations ... under the control of a candidate or the major purpose of which is the nomination or election of a candidate,” id. at 79 (emphasis added), to prevent “burdens ... certain to deter ... independent political speech,” id. at 75 (citation omitted). This speech-chilling problem arose because “‘political committee’ [wa]s defined only in terms of the amount of annual ‘contributions’ and ‘expenditures’” by the entity as Montana does, id. at 79, imposing entitybased burdens, not just activity-based reports. This Court has repeatedly reaffirmed that test and recently declared entity-based burdens triggered by PAC-status “expensive,” “extensive,” and “onerous.” Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310, 335-39 (2010). Montana imposes PAC-status without the majorpurpose test, based only on a group’s expenditure of just $251 or more on political speech. In a nonprecedential opinion, the Ninth Circuit rejected the majorpurpose test in state elections, creating a 5-4 Circuit split on the constitutional requirement for the test. And the court below denied a motion for publication, which would have made its opinion precedential, creating private law for Petitioner but not others. Petitioner presents two issues for review:

1. Whether states are barred by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution from imposing PAC-status, with its resulting entity-based burdens, on groups lacking Buckley’s “major purpose.”

2. Whether declaring an opinion “not precedent” (i)