This Friday, January 30th, will ring in the 50th anniversary of American life under Buckley v. Valeo, the cornerstone campaign finance case – and an underappreciated donor privacy precedent.

It’s easy, at a remove of half a century, to forget how apocalyptic the Watergate scandal landed in 1970s America. Today, most of us focus on the third-rate burglary and bugging of the Democratic National Committee headquarters, or the farcical cast of characters that surrounded Richard Nixon as he authorized covering up that break-in. But Watergate was so much more than dirty tricks or dark hilarity.

The scandal revealed that President Nixon presided over a wide-ranging criminal enterprise from the White House, which included shaking down large corporations for illegal campaign donations and directly selling government posts for contributions – ambassador to Spain or Portugal cost $100,000, Luxembourg $300,000. Garrett M. Graff, Watergate: A New History 147–48 (Kindle Ed.). But for his pardon, Nixon would have been imprisoned, serving time with his own attorney general, John Mitchell. And this didn’t seem to be just a Nixon problem, either. The 1970s were chockablock with ethics and corruption scandals – including, amazingly, that “one Republican member of the Senate Watergate committee gave up re-election to fight an indictment for bribery.” David Frum, How We Got Here 29 (Basic Books 2000).

Hardly an atmosphere conducive to calm reckoning. So Congress did what it almost always does in a crisis: it blindly lashed out in a colossal overreaction. Just as we’ve forgotten the deranged criminality of the Nixon White House, we’ve also forgotten how alien the as-passed Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974 was to the American constitutional order. The Legislative Branch may have aimed at dirty tricks and corruption, but it struck hard against freedom of speech and association.

It flatly outlawed a lot of political discussion through spending caps – an astounding thing to do in a country where legitimacy depends on the informed consent of the governed. It also virtually eliminated donor privacy. The Act’s disclosure provisions fell not just on campaigns, but ideological communications that might merely influence an election, including anodyne messaging from “groups that do no more than discuss issues of public importance on a wholly nonpartisan basis.” Buckley v. Valeo, 519 F.2d 821, 832 (D.C. Cir. 1975) (en banc).

FECA’s disclosure mandates were nothing less than a legislative repeal of a series of Supreme Court decisions, beginning with NAACP v. Alabama in 1958, that had fenced off civil society from the grasping hands of government officials. The Ford administration went along, using the typical language of government emergency – “The times demand this legislation.” – to justify making FECA the law of the land.

Thankfully, the First Amendment had a legislative champion in Senator James L. Buckley (R-NY). Buckley was no Nixon apologist – he was the first conservative Republican senator to call for the President to resign. But Buckley knew that the Constitution must always be prized over transitory passions. He couldn’t scupper FECA, but he managed to get a provision placed in the law that provided for its expedited judicial review. And then he led a coalition of ideologically diverse groups (from the ACLU to Human Events) and political figures (he brought along liberal lion Eugene McCarthy), as the lead plaintiff in an omnibus First Amendment challenge to the law.

Buckley’s challenge didn’t get off to a stellar start. The full D.C. Circuit, which under the emergency review provisions of FECA initially heard the case, left much of the law intact. But it did strip out a donor disclosure requirement aimed at speech that merely “set[] forth the candidate’s position on any public issue.” 519 F.2d at 869–70. The federal government conceded defeat on that point and never appealed it – admitting such an imposition could never be squared with the Constitution. Senator Buckley and his allies immediately took the rest of the case up to the Supreme Court.

It was there, of course, where the Buckley decision earned its keep as an (admittingly flawed) foundational First Amendment opinion. The Court recognized FECA for what it was – a perhaps well-meaning effort, but also a machine gun aimed at its freedom of association caselaw. So the Buckley Court axed FECA’s spending caps and severely limited its donor disclosure provisions, upholding only what it deemed absolutely necessary to preserve the “free functioning of our national institutions.” Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, 66 (1976) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). Official curiosity about a nonprofit’s supporters doesn’t meet that cut.

Relying explicitly on NAACP v. Alabama, Bates v. City of Little Rock, and Shelton v. Tucker, the Buckley Court made clear that those cases were not cabined to a particular struggle or point in time – but a “strict test” that every government demand for “‘financial transactions [that] can reveal much about a person’s activities, associations, and beliefs’” must meet before publicizing donor information. Buckley, 424 U.S. at 64–66 (quoting Cal. Bankers Ass’n v. Shultz, 416 U.S. 21, 78–79 (1974) (Powell, J., concurring). Consequently, financial supporter disclosure was largely limited to “spending that is unambiguously related to the campaign of a particular federal candidate.” Id. at 79–81. Outside of those narrow circumstances, “the First Amendment right to ‘speak one’s mind on all public institutions,’” id. at 48 (citing N.Y. Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 269 (1964)) (ellipses omitted), is secured by prohibiting government efforts to source that speech through “the invasion of privacy of belief.” Id. at 66.

And so, when governments try – as they repeatedly have over the past five decades – to use campaign finance laws to expose donors to civil society organizations, they must wrestle with Buckley. That’s no panacea: lower courts have blessed specious anti-privacy laws that came dressed as good government campaign finance reform in defiance of the Buckley holding. But under Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court has, by and large, held fast to the Buckley bargain.

When Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta clarified that any donor demand must meet at least exacting scrutiny, it was essentially applying Buckley. If the Court strikes down New Jersey’s wildly inappropriate demand for a crisis pregnancy center’s donor list this Term, we can credit Buckley for preserving NAACP v. Alabama from legislative attack all those years ago.

No doubt, current crises will evoke legislative demands (both well-meaning and nefarious) to strip Americans of their political freedoms, including privacy of financial association. And so civil society groups must be vigilant against such encroachments on liberty. Buckley, after all, improved FECA—but even better than Buckley would have been no FECA at all.

As Buckley turns fifty, we know that the work of the First Amendment is unfinished – as it always will be so long as politicians in power see force as the easy solution to thorny problems of state. We are, after all, Americans, and “[it] has been our destiny to attempt what no society has attempted, the making of justice through a Constitution. It is as we are; so it is not yet complete.” Philip Bobbitt, Constitutional Fate 242 (Oxford Univ. Press 1984). But, perhaps, if we remember to stand up for freedom of association – as Senator Buckley and the opinion bearing his name did – we can draw just a little nearer to completing our more perfect Union.