MOSCOW, February 20 - RAPSI. The US Supreme Court will revisit the deeply divisive issue of campaign finance, this time in the context of the aggregate sum individuals can donate to political campaigns, according to an order list issued by the court on Tuesday.

Campaign finance has been an enormously contentious issue in American politics since former President Andrew Jackson devised the idea of funding his 1828 presidential campaign with the assistance of a political committee, according to JURIST Legal News & Research. The impact of the political committee’s contribution was palpable, nearly doubling voter turnout while simultaneously spiking the standard cost of running a political campaign in America. By the time Abraham Lincoln ran for the presidency 20 years later, he nearly went broke attempting to fund his own campaign. It soon became clear that outside contributions would be necessary to any successful US political campaign.

Since then, a series of federal laws have been enacted, serving in turns to liberalize and restrict campaign finance policy. To combat the threat of corruption that becomes all too clear when wealthy individuals and successful companies are licensed to influence crucial elections, the Tillman Act of 1907 prohibited corporations and nationally chartered banks from directly contributing to presidential and congressional campaigns.

In 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act extended the prohibition to labor unions.

Political action committees (PACs) were established shortly thereafter as a means of allowing labor unions, corporations, and other associations to contribute to campaigns by less direct means.

Despite this loophole, however, spending caps limit the amount that individuals can contribute to federal campaigns.

However, the US Supreme Court issued a highly controversial decision in 2010 extending political speech rights enjoyed by individuals to corporations, explaining: “We find no basis for the proposition that, in the context of political speech, the Government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers.”

Recognizing that the “anticorruption interest is not sufficient to displace the speech here in question,” the court held that corporations should be entitled to donate as much money to political campaigns as individual citizens are. Still, corporations are obviously bound by the same spending caps as individuals.

It is this latter issue that the McCutcheon, Shaun, et al. v. Federal Election Commission will address.

More specifically, the case will determine the constitutionality of statutory limits currently in place on the amounts that individuals may contribute to candidates, political parties, and other players in the context of federal elections.