FEC V. Wisconsin: Right to ... Petition? A Comment on FEC V. Wisconsin Right to Life‪.‬

INTRODUCTION FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc. (WRTL) (1) is the Supreme Court's latest attempt to extricate grassroots advocacy by nonprofit corporations from the morass of political broadcast restrictions under the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act (BCRA). (2) As with the many cases preceding it, the standard pronounced by the Court in WRTL is deceptively straightforward: a political broadcast is an "electioneering communication" that may be proscribed "only if the ad is susceptible of no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate." (3) The Court held this axiom true notwithstanding the identity of the advertisement's sponsor because "the corporate identity of a speaker does not strip corporations of all free speech rights [under the First Amendment]." (4) The question the Court should have addressed is whether the nonprofit corporate identity of a speaker entitles such corporations to speech rights under the Petition Clause rather than the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.