Francis R. Valeo

Francis Ralph "Frank" Valeo (January 30, 1916 – April 9, 2006) was the Secretary of the United States Senate and "ex officio" member of the Federal Election Commission. He was the defendant/appellee for the federal government of the United States in "Buckley v. Valeo", 424 U.S. 1 (1976), in which the Supreme Court of the United States upheld federal limits on campaign contributions but struck down limits on campaign expenditures with a novel verdict that money equated with free speech.
Life.
Valeo was the son of a shoe factory foreman. He was born in Brooklyn, New York. He was a 1936 political science graduate of New York University, where he also received a master's degree in international relations in 1942. He served in China during World War II.
After the war, he was a foreign policy specialist for the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress, and was loaned to the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He traveled repeatedly to Southeast Asia with Montana Senator Mike Mansfield. In 1963, after the Bobby Baker scandal shook the Senate, Mansfield appointed Valeo to replace Baker as Majority Secretary, a position he held during the long filibuster over the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 1965 he was elected Secretary of the Senate. In 1973, he swore in Joe Biden as the junior Senator from Delaware at the Delaware Division of the Wilmington Medical Center. Biden was caring for his two sons following a car crash that killed his wife and daughter two weeks earlier.
Valeo's books include "The Japanese Diet and the U.S. Congress" (1983) and "Mike Mansfield, Majority Leader: A Different Kind of Senate, 1961–1976" (1999).