obviously the judiciary not affected at snaul no impact on the shutdown on that? reporter: nationwide the federal courts have said they have enough money to operate for ten days. now, the supreme court has said they would hear argument at the end of the week, they would decide. there s another argument week coming up next week. we ll find out on friday whether they re going to hear argument next week or whether they ll have to shut down too. michael, assuming, i think a fair assumption, this court will at least aside with mccutchen on the aggregate limits, whether they go as far as to get rid of individual limits, that is in doubt. that happens, do political parties suddenly able to raise more money or do you think it s not going to have that much of an impact? i do think it s more likely than not, chuck, that the aggregate limits will be struck down by this court. roberts court is has been skeptical of campaign finance restrictions in the last five years. then the key issue is d
0 united. that provided a blueprint of how to raise money outside the political party structure. so big money was back, just not inside the two-party system, only on the outside. and today we have yet another supreme court case with the potential of removing another barrier to campaign donations. the case is called mccutchen versus the ftc and it s a direct challenge to donation limits put in place nearly 40 years ago. let me explain the limits they re talking about. federal law limits the total amount you can contribute in a two-year election cycle. so no one individual can contribute more than $123,200 total to all candidates running for federal office 2013 and 2014. there s also a base limit of course in place which says an individual can t donate more than $2,600 directly to any one federal candidate during their campaign cycle primary in general. an important distinction. mccutchen isn t challenging the base limit. he s challenging the aggregate limit. he told pete williams he sim
happen post mccutchen, we re going to see more and more big dollar donations. but it s important for us to not get into despair, there are things that can happen. we can still have a small system, a small donor matching financing, governor cuomo here in new york, actually had a chance to make history and give us a system of public financing and he punted the ball on that and that s really unfortunate. whenever you have this issue of public financing come up, it came up with the obama campaign in 08, you can t compete with someone who can afford to bundle you billions of dollars. what we have seen is that a small donor match system, like they have in connecticut, like they have in new york actually can be competitive. it s a voluntary system. it s particularly effective at the state and local level. but we could do something like this in congress. there s a new bill in congress