(This profile of James Bopp, architect of the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case, ran September 5, 2009 in National Journal.)

The Supreme Court's unusual rehearing of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, slated for September 9, is a shot at vindication for those who oppose government regulation of campaign financing.

That goes double for James Bopp, the indefatigable legal gadfly from Terre Haute, Ind. Over the past 35 years, Bopp has led many of the legal challenges to campaign finance laws on behalf of conservative and Republican Party activists -- including the original lawsuit brought by Citizens United.

For those who believe that limiting corporate money in elections is not only good policy but also settled law, the rehearing is the latest example of two troubling and interrelated trends: a flood of legal challenges, led mainly by Bopp, and the rightward tilt of the Court.

"There does appear to be a concerted effort to attack the campaign finance reform system across the board, in as many places and using as many theories as possible," says Susan Liss, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, which does research, advocacy, and litigation in support of campaign finance laws.

After hearing oral arguments in Citizens United in March, the Court unexpectedly invited a re-examination of fundamental points of campaign finance law that the plaintiffs hadn't originally challenged. The action raised the possibility that the Court might be contemplating a major break with recent precedent and could overturn rules restricting corporate spending on elections -- some of which date to the early 1900s.

"What's being talked about is allowing the immense aggregation of corporate wealth [to influence] federal elections in ways that haven't existed in this century," said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a Washington nonprofit that supports campaign finance laws.

That prospect would have been hard to imagine a few years ago. In 2002, Congress passed the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act, also known as McCain-Feingold after its leading Senate co-sponsors, Republican John McCain of Arizona and Democratic Russell Feingold of Wisconsin. The following year, the Supreme Court ruled against the plaintiffs in the landmark case McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, and declared that McCain-Feingold passed constitutional muster.

The legislation and the Court's blessing on it were bitter pills for Bopp, who staunchly opposed the bill before it passed and represented one of the plaintiffs in the suit. "We have never had, at least since the 1918 ... Sedition Act," he says, "such extensive prohibition on involvement in our democracy."

Campaign finance laws favor the wealthy at the expense of ordinary Americans, Bopp contends. The laws allow rich people to spend as much as they want, whenever they want to independently support a candidate. But "average citizens ... have to pool their resources," he says, by joining political parties or ideological groups, which face myriad restrictions on how they raise and spend money.

After the Supreme Court's 2002 ruling seemed to foreclose constitutional challenges to the law itself, Bopp instead began challenging the constitutionality of its application in specific circumstances. In 2007, he landed a blow in Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life, which the Court used to trim a key aspect of McCain-Feingold: a provision banning use of corporate or union treasury funds for broadcasting electioneering ads within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of a general election.

The secret of that success? "The short, flip answer is that Justice [Sandra Day] O'Connor left the Court and was replaced by [Justice Samuel] Alito" in early 2006, said Trevor Potter, a lawyer at Caplin & Drysdale and the founding president and general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center. Potter, a former FEC chairman, was also counsel to McCain's presidential campaign in 2008. Bopp and other opponents of campaign finance restrictions are "bringing challenges post-O'Connor because they see an opportunity that they didn't have before," Potter said.

The legal challenges and their sponsors, Potter argues, have a broader agenda than advertised. The cases are not a random search for remedies to individual groups' problems but a systematic attempt to chip away at rules that they failed to overturn outright. "I think it's clear that there's a movement here," Potter said. "It's fair to say there is also an ideological and political link to the opposition to campaign finance laws."

Some of the groups that Bopp represents appear to have been created specifically to present challenges to the FEC. In The Real Truth About Obama Inc. v. Federal Election Commission, Bopp filed suit on behalf of the Virginia organization in July 2008, a scant six days after it incorporated and before it had raised any money. The group passed through to Bopp's law firm almost all of the $15,000 subsequently contributed by two out-of-state donors. A few months later, Bopp filed suit against the FEC on behalf of a North Carolina organization called the Committee for Truth in Politics that had been incorporated just a week earlier by a local Republican Party official.

In another recent suit challenging a different aspect of the law, the Center for Competitive Politics is providing legal representation for a new outfit called SpeechNow; its founders include one of the center's board members, Edward Crane, who is also president of the libertarian Cato Institute.

To some, the prevalence of conservative and Republican Party activists among the plaintiffs raises questions about whether the suits are intended to seek partisan advantage as much as to protect free speech. Bopp, for example, is representing the Republican National Committee in a challenge to the McCain-Feingold law's restrictions on political parties' raising and spending of formerly unregulated soft money. He is an active RNC member and served during the 2008 campaign season in a variety of volunteer positions with the RNC and with Mitt Romney's campaign for the GOP presidential nomination.

"Republicans have traditionally viewed corporate America as their principal financial backer, much as Democrats view labor," Potter said. "Republicans object to the soft-money ban because they need corporate soft money.... If these cases are successful in removing these [barriers to corporate campaign spending], that significantly changes the political battlefield."

Suspicions about Bopp's objectives have been fueled by the fact that the nonprofit James Madison Center for Free Speech, where Bopp has served as general counsel since 1997, doesn't disclose its funders. The center's revenues rose from $5,000 in the late 1990s to a peak of just over $1 million in 2006, according to tax filings. The group paid most of that money to Bopp and his law firm, Bopp, Coleson & Bostrom.

Researchers at Potter's group note that one of Madison's board members, Betsy DeVos, was a large soft-money donor to the RNC before the McCain-Feingold law banned such contributions. Bopp says he started the organization in the hope of "galvanizing opposition [to campaign finance laws] among conservatives." As for disclosing his funders, he responds simply, "Why would I want to? Organizations are entitled to privacy."

Since late 2005, Bopp's group has been joined in its opposition to campaign finance laws by the Center for Competitive Politics, co-founded by former FEC Vice Chairman Brad Smith and Steve Hoersting, a former counsel at the commission. Smith says he created the center because "it was clear to me, before I went on the commission and even more so afterwards, that the debate was extremely one-sided," dominated by well-funded campaign finance law supporters, including Potter's center, Democracy 21, and the Brennan Center -- all of which get grants from large foundations.

Bopp and Smith bristle at any suggestion that their legal challenges are manufactured. "They are not made-up cases," Smith said. "They are factual situations that are favorable" to a strong legal challenge -- just like test cases that seek to challenge any existing law.

"The bottom line is that people really want to do these things," Bopp said, referring to the actions at the core of his lawsuits. "They have always wanted to participate in democracy. But now they're confronted with laws that limit and prohibit their involvement. Their only choice is to take court action."

As for a hidden partisan agenda, Bopp and Smith note that challenges to campaign finance laws have come from across the ideological spectrum: The California Democratic Party was a plaintiff in the McConnell case, he said, and the American Civil Liberties Union routinely files briefs in support of challenges to campaign finance laws.

Bopp simply reverses the accusation of a covert partisanship. Democrats "believe they have achieved a partisan political advantage" under campaign finance law, he says, "so it's not unexpected that those disadvantaged" would challenge the system.