Can a person who makes a political contribution to their own campaign be denied a right to make their own speech if they are not allowed to make it free?

Our representative government requires and relies on the ready flow of ideas between elected legislators and the voters. Those ideas are mostly transmitted during election campaigns by advertisements and organized rallies, examples of free speech, neither of which come free. Contributors to the campaigns want their ideas made known and accepted by the campaigning legislators. Restrictions on citizens' campaign contributions limit their ability to make their ideas known and to influence the legislators to accept and further those ideas. For these reasons, our First Amendment law permits limits on such contributions only if the restrictions are closely drawn to a valid, important state interest. Courts must carefully scrutinize such limitations. See McCutcheon v. FEC , U.S. , 134 S.Ct. 1434, 1451, 188 L.Ed.2d 468 (2014) ("the First Amendment requires us to err on the side of protecting political speech rather than suppressing it" (citation omitted)). Here, the district court

[873 F.3d 1188]