Mark Schmitt has written an interesting piece, and Bruce Cain has briefly responded, on the surging skepticism among a distinguished group of scholars about the last decades of political reform.  Schmitt respects the skeptics’ work.  But he worries that they may also have succumbed to a dangerous naiveté.  He means that they may overstate the negative effects of recent reform efforts, as in diminishing the role of parties, and may make too much of what can be accomplished by countermeasures to strengthen the capacity for effective governance.  It is fine to say, as these skeptics do, that we should value more a messy and transactional politics by which consensus is forged and accomplishments are possible, but Schmitt insists that we proceed with care, lest we romanticize the time of shady backroom dealing rigged against anyone lacking money and privilege.

This warning seems premature: there is little cause to worry that these skeptics have gone too far, or that their prescriptions would usher in a new Gilded Age of opaque politics full of the risk of corruption and plutocratic control.  They still have a fair amount of work to do in pulling the conversation toward a reasonable “middle," away from the exaggerations and distortions of the political reform debate over many years.  One challenge has been overcoming the pressures on reform thought from the reform movement.

“What is corruption, how should we define it, and why is it bad?”

This is the question put to the panel organized by Fordham Law and featuring key theorists about corruption and equality, all of them on the reform side.  It is available on video and well worth watching.  Rick Hasen has already reported that he and Larry Lessig came to a sort of detente – – coming closer, he said, “than we ever have before” on the role of money. This is an understatement.  By the time they were done, Lessig, champion of a theory of “dependence corruption”, and Hasen, vigorous exponent of a theory of political equality, agreed that they might be talking about roughly the same thing.  Somewhat more on her own was Zephyr Teachout, who argued eloquently for a morality-based view of corruption centrally concerned with shoring up civic culture.

This conference may have signaled the beginning of the end of the emphasis in leading reform scholarship on “corruption”, at least in the sense in which it has dominated the debate for decades.  The difference between Lessig’s position and Hasen’s is “semantic”, as Hasen now sees it, and Professor Lessig does not appear to disagree.  Quid pro quo corruption is not Professor Lessig’s primary concern.  In fact, he told the conference that when he meets with Members of Congress, he finds them generally to be well-motivated—good men and women, as the saying goes, caught up in a bad system.

Common Cause has produced a report to show the involvement of the “religious right” in a systematic legal attack on campaign finance restrictions. At the center of the tale is lawyer Jim Bopp and around him are clients with passionate commitments who wish pursue them without financing limitations or disclosure.  Common Cause describes this as a “crusade.”

As a descriptive piece, there is nothing wrong with this report. The activities of Bopp and his clients are presented with reasonable accuracy, as far as one can tell.  But on another level, the report could be read to be making a political point—to imply that the religious right, waging this “crusade” against campaign finance, is exhibiting an unsavory zealotry on regulatory issues like the one some might attribute to its religious commitments. The word “crusade” is not here a throw -away.  It appears in the title of the Report, then again in the Executive Summary, and finally once more in the Conclusion.  It is an imputation to this cause of extremism.

The study by Emory’s Alan Abramovitz, recently discussed by Jonathan Bernstein, heavily discounts the effect of heavy outside spending on the 2014 Congressional elections. His conclusion: that the impact was zero or barely higher, and that the more significant factors were state-level presidential partisanship and incumbency.  But neither Abramovitz nor Bernstein mean to wave away the public policy or regulatory implications of campaign spending.  Candidates still need the money and ask for it, and questions are raised by their dependence on those who supply it.

Still, this study and others are useful reminders of a confusion in the campaign finance debate—the difference between conceptions of a healthy electoral process and worries about the corruption of government. It is not necessary to the importance of donors or spenders that they be clearly able to “buy elections."  It should be enough that their spending might sway the choice of the campaign issues raised and debated and determine the competitiveness of candidates associated with particular policy positions. This is not a question of the effect of their money on government, but on the electoral process itself. 

Larry Lessig and Brad Smith remain at odds over the complaint Professor Smith’s organization, the Center for Competitive Politics, filed against Mayday PAC for violating the disclaimer rules. While not using precisely this word, Lessig believes that the CCP action was petty.  The problem, he says, was a breakdown in approval procedures and vendor performance, and no one was harmed.  Smith has no use for the excuse and he says that an organization dedicated to regulating political activity ought to be held to account for violating the regulations it is dedicated to promoting.