Alcohol Lobby Spent $500,000 in One State to Kill a Tax Hike

How decades of Supreme Court rulings, $29.3 million in annual federal lobbying, and targeted entertainment spending in state capitols have systematically protected alcohol industry profits at...

In 2023, while New Mexico legislators debated raising the state's alcohol tax, alcohol industry lobbyists spent an estimated $75,000 entertaining the very committee members with jurisdiction over that bill, according to a report co-authored by Feldman for Common Cause New Mexico cited by Stat News on October 24, 2024. The tax increase failed. That single episode is not an aberration. It is the endpoint of a fifty-year legal and political architecture constructed brick by brick — some of those bricks laid by the Supreme Court of the United States.

The foundation was poured in 1976. In Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, the Supreme Court bifurcated money in politics into two categories: contributions to candidates, which Congress could limit, and independent expenditures, which it could not. The Court's reasoning was that spending money to influence elections constitutes protected speech under the First Amendment. Whatever the constitutional merits of that argument, its practical consequence was immediate and durable: any actor who wanted to spend unlimited sums influencing elections had only to route that money outside a candidate's formal campaign. The pressure valve was open.

Thirty-four years later, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310, decided January 21, 2010, on a 5-4 vote authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, extended that logic to corporations. Alcohol companies are corporations. The ruling directly expanded the constitutional right of Anheuser-Busch InBev, Molson Coors, Constellation Brands, Diageo, Brown-Forman, and every other corporate player in the industry to spend unlimited sums through Super PACs and 501(c)(4) organizations — entities whose donors face narrowed or nonexistent disclosure requirements. Four years after that, McCutcheon v. FEC, 572 U.S. 185 (2014), struck aggregate contribution limits, allowing a single wealthy industry donor to simultaneously flood money to dozens of federal candidates. The legal infrastructure for purchasing political outcomes at scale was complete.

The industry moved into that infrastructure with documented efficiency. According to the Institute of Alcohol Studies, U.S. drinks companies declared $29.3 million in federal lobbying expenditures in 2019 alone, and declared $25.0 million in campaign contributions during the 2016 presidential election cycle. Both figures are statutory floors, not ceilings. They exclude state-level lobbying, in-kind contributions, spending routed through trade associations whose lobbying costs are not attributed to individual member companies, and independent expenditure spending through undisclosed vehicles. The Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, the Beer Institute, the Wine Institute, and the National Beer Wholesalers Association are all registered federal lobbyists; their individual annual expenditure figures are on file at the Senate Office of Public Records at lda.senate.gov, but were not disaggregated in the source material available for this analysis.

Back in New Mexico, the mechanism becomes concrete. Over the decade from 2013 to 2023, alcohol industry sources contributed nearly $500,000 to state legislators, according to the Common Cause New Mexico report cited in Stat News. Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham is named in that reporting as a frequent recipient of industry campaign contributions, though the specific dollar amounts received by the Governor are not quantified in the available records — a gap the New Mexico Secretary of State's campaign finance database could close. The $75,000 in 2023 entertainment expenditures was not spread evenly across the legislature. It was concentrated on members of tax-related committees — the precise decision-makers with the power to advance or kill the alcohol tax bill. A peer-reviewed systematic review published in Alcohol & Alcoholism (PMC6100095) identifies this pattern as textbook reactive lobbying: concentrated at the decision point, targeted at the decision-makers with jurisdiction.

The public interest cost of this system is not theoretical. George Stigler's foundational 1971 analysis in the Bell Journal of Economics, referenced by Georgetown Law's Denny Center for Democratic Capitalism, established that regulatory capture is a straightforward rational-actor outcome: the return on lobbying investment — in the form of favorable regulation or defeated taxation — far exceeds its cost for organized industry players. Public choice theory, developed by Nobel laureate James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, explains why consumers and taxpayers cannot effectively counter-organize: an alcohol tax increase of ten cents per drink costs the average consumer perhaps $20 to $50 per year, making political organizing irrational at the individual level, while the same tax increase costs a major distributor or brewer millions annually, making lobbying highly rational. The result, as GIS Reports Online summarizes: 'organized lobbies have far lower organizational costs relative to their benefits.' The defeated New Mexico tax increase was not an isolated policy failure. It was the predictable output of a system operating exactly as Stigler and Buchanan described.

As of December 2025, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case — the specific caption of which is not available in the source materials — in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, per Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton, had upheld existing campaign finance limits while explicitly noting challengers' 'fair points' that the Court has progressively tightened free-speech restrictions on campaign finance regulations since 2001. The 6th Circuit declined to act unilaterally but left the door open for the Supreme Court to do so. Amy Howe reported on those arguments for SCOTUSblog on December 9-10, 2025. Any further loosening of contribution or expenditure limits would directly benefit capital-intensive regulated industries — alcohol prominently among them — that have already demonstrated both the willingness and the capacity to deploy political spending at scale.

What remains hidden is substantial. The full breakdown of which specific alcohol companies and trade associations contributed to which named New Mexico legislators is not available without direct queries to the New Mexico Secretary of State's campaign finance database. The exact dollar amounts received by Governor Lujan Grisham from industry sources are similarly unquantified in public reporting. The methodology behind the $75,000 entertainment expenditure estimate has not been disclosed. No comprehensive state-by-state tabulation exists in available public reporting of alcohol tax increase attempts, lobbying expenditures opposing them, and legislative outcomes — a dataset that would require simultaneous queries of all fifty states' campaign finance and lobbying disclosure systems. At the federal level, individual corporate lobbying expenditures by Anheuser-Busch InBev, Molson Coors, Constellation Brands, Diageo, and Brown-Forman are filed annually with the Senate Office of Public Records and are searchable at lda.senate.gov, but were not independently verified for this analysis. The instruments that would surface what remains hidden are already public: the Lobbying Disclosure Act database, the FEC contribution records at fec.gov, fifty state Secretary of State campaign finance portals, SEC political expenditure disclosures for publicly traded companies, and — once decided — the full opinion and amicus record in the campaign finance case argued before the Supreme Court in December 2025.