A lot of the yelling and screaming heard about McCutcheon has recently migrated into the debate about disclosure. Charles Krauthammer has complained that the zealots have ruined disclosure as a policy option by misusing donor information to launch attacks on them. And Brad Smith took to the webpages of the Center for Competitive Politics to refute the charge that on the question of mandatory disclosure, conservatives once open to transparency had reversed course, supposedly shifting with the winds now blowing against campaign finance regulation overall.

The decision in  McCutcheon  has not been the only source of lively rhetoric in the world of campaign finance. The FEC's commissioners took to very open squabbling, putting their cases in Statements of Reason and elaborating on them in op-eds and letters placed with the New York Times. The conflict in this instance involved Commissioner Ravel on one side and all of the Republican commissioners on the other, and they swiped at each other in strong terms over the properly defined responsibility of FEC Commissioners and the role of courts.

In an interesting Washington Post article, Professor Heather Gerken has proposed with co-authors a new strategy to advance  a core reform objective, the enhancement of transparency, as other options seemingly dwindle after CItizens United and McCutcheon. Heather is well known and well-respected for just such an insistence on thinking beyond the well-traveled, now largely exhausted policy choices. A good example is the Democracy Index, which she constructed to “harness politics to fix politics,” by generating political incentives for the improvement of performance on election administration through the publication of public rankings.

Richard Epstein has written about Citizens United before, and he returns to the subject again in his magisterial treatise on the classical liberal conception of the Constitution. His argument includes a challenge to widely held beliefs about corporate political power and motivation . The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government (2014) at 458; see also Richard A. Epstein, Citizens United v. FEC: The Constitutional Right that Big Corporations Should Have But Do Not Want,  34 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 639, 655-660 (2011). He does not suggest that the regulation of government corruption is at all times unfounded or ill-advised, only that it is misdirected to the sphere of public political speech. The analysis he offers usefully raises again the question: is the debate about political reform overly invested in political campaign activity, while attention is paid intermittently and with little impact to other ways that well-financed interests move policy?  These are questions that have been productively raised by other scholars in the field, notably Sam Issacharoff and Rick Pildes.

“He just believes what people tell him”

David Grant speaking of his father Woody

“Nebraska” (2013)

Paul Ryan contends that a posting here misrepresented the Campaign Legal Center's views on the proposed IRS tax-exempt political activity rules.  He denies that, in pressing for fully disclosed 501(c)(4) ad funding, the Center is hoping to diminish the volume of “attack ads.”  His organization’s “whole” and only point, Ryan insists, is information to the voters about who is paying for the ads.  Quelling negative campaign speech is not their concern, only “promotion of transparency.” An able and energetic proponent of reform, Ryan deserves a further explanation of why someone might reach a different conclusion about the various concerns moving the Center on disclosure issues.