Beware the opinion on a disclosure issue that begins with the fabled Brandeis observation that “sunlight is said to be the best disinfectant.”  It is meant to make all that follows relatively simple. Brandeis is powerful authority, and he was not just claiming the insight for his own, but instead assigned it universal standing: disclosure “is said” to have this cleansing effect, and it is the “best” of effects.

The Fifth Circuit propelled itself down this path in a case, Justice v. Hosemann, that the Supreme Court is being asked to take up. 771 F.3d 285 (2014).  The question is whether individuals coming together to influence a ballot initiative, but spending little more than $200, can be compelled to register and report as a political committee.  Mississippi law includes this requirement and, finding that the plaintiffs had standing to bring a facial challenge, the Fifth Circuit reversed the lower court and upheld the law as a constitutional measure to serve the voters’ “informational interest.”

The Court began with Brandeis and then moved quickly to suggest that others states have imposed even more onerous registration requirements for issues speech, set at still lower spending levels.  This seems to be a monumental non sequitur.  That a number of states have adopted constitutionally questionable laws does not settle, in their favor, the question of constitutionality, or logically make the case for Mississippi’s slightly more liberalized version.

But there is also the suggestion that in the Internet Age, the voters’ informational interest requires disclosure deep down, to the most modest spending of a few hundred dollars.  The Fifth Circuit cited in full this passage from National Organization for Women v. McKee:

In an age characterized by the rapid multiplication of media outlets and the rise of internet reporting, the “marketplace of ideas” has become flooded with a profusion of information and political messages. Citizens rely ever more on a message's source as a proxy for reliability and a barometer of political spin.

The agreement apparently reached on the omnibus omits some campaign finance related items but includes others.  The party coordinated spending limits remain in place, while there are provisions blocking IRS and SEC action in the next year to promulgate political spending disclosure rules. For reformers, the results are decidedly mixed, and they are both relieved and exasperated.  And for them and all others, there is also the question of whether this development suggests anything else about the choices faced in the reform debate.

Right now the basic complaint about Super PACs is that they can enlist the and endorsement support of their favored candidates, as in fundraising, and still claim they are “independent” and spend without limit.  But the Supreme Court—not the FEC, not wily campaign finance lawyers—is the reason why this is possible.  In Buckley, the Court tied “independence” to the coordination of specific expenditures with candidates. Without this coordination, the Buckley Court determined, the candidate runs the risk that the expenditure could be unhelpful or counterproductive and is not fairly charged with a “contribution” subject to limits.

No candidate request, control or involvement means, therefore, no spending limits.  The independent committee's public advertising then must contain a specific statement that the candidate did not "authorize" the communication. 11 C.F.R. §110.11(b)(3). This may be true, but the voter checking the committee’s formal registration with the FEC will find that the committee declares itself, and not just a specific expenditure, to be unauthorized.

In a technical sense, this is true: the committee is “unauthorized” because it is an independent committee whose expenditures are made without the candidate’s direction or involvement.  But the absence of control over or involvement in particular independent committee expenditures does not mean the absence of any contact with the committee.  The candidates can applaud an independent committee’s formation and operation for their benefit, and they may appear at the committee's events as guests or featured speakers and assist with its fundraising.

Voters may well be perplexed.

FEC Chair Ravel is not the first former or present Commissioner to turn to Comedy Central to lampoon her own agency.  Trevor Potter, once also a Chair, came to run a major reform organization that collaborated on bits of high comedy with Stephen Colbert. He even would emerge for his performance in a shower of dollars from something called the Mazda Scandal Booth. But he was out of the agency then and Ms. Ravel is still running it, and she decided that she had had enough of the FEC’s dysfunction and would play it for laughs. One of her colleagues was not amused.

Chair Ravel defended her appearance as free speech and as the only way now, all else having failed, to make her point. The problem for the FEC in any resort to high comedy is that the audience may misunderstand the joke. It is not a far cry from laughing at the agency to laughing at the law and concluding that politicians will never make or enforce rules against their own interest. The same ridicule can and has been directed at reform proposals.

The quips at the FEC’s expense depend on clever bits of exaggeration and oversimplification that, in the best humor, expose some measure of truth. The tricky part is keeping the exaggeration under control so that it does not overwhelm the routine and strike a false note. Does the audience come away both entertained and better informed, or at risk of being misled?

Sometimes those who disagree about campaign finance are almost deliberately talking past each other, dreading any concessions because, they think, to give an inch is to surrender a mile.  This seems increasingly the case in arguments about disclosure and a good example are the opposing reactions to the Supreme Court's recent decision to decline review of California's 501(c)(3) disclosure requirements upheld by the Ninth Circuit in Center for Competitive Politics v. Harris, 784 F.3d 1307 (9th Cir. 2015).

Here is one fundamental difference: the belief on the part of decision proponents that it was a victory for campaign finance disclosure, and reply by critics that it had nothing to do with campaign finance at all.  And indeed, in technical terms, the case is not a campaign finance case – – it does not involve electoral activities, which 501(c)(3)'s may not conduct, and the information that the government is asking for is not in theory to be made available to the general public but only for the use of authorities for law enforcement.

To those who favor the State of California’s position, however, its significance goes well beyond its holding viewed in the most narrow terms.  If the case did not concern campaign finance, they seem to be saying, it was close enough: it involved a privately funded nonprofit advocacy organization, and a court willing to invalidate those disclosure rules might be tempted to export this critical attitude to the sphere of campaign finance.  There is a fear at work here that if a crack opens in disclosure requirements anywhere, they could expand to swallow up the campaign finance rules. On this theory, the court should be favorable to disclosure of political activity all kinds, to avoid damage down the line to rules of one particular kind.

The discussion of the parameters of compelled disclosure has become, in this sense, politicized.  Anxieties about the collapse of the campaign finance laws are gathering around all roughly similar disclosure requirements as a sort of last stand.  Rick Hasen has written that "campaign finance disclosure laws are under attack" and that much of the criticism has been "offered disingenuously with the intention to create a fully deregulated campaign finance system." Richard L. Hasen, Chill Out: A Qualified Defense of Campaign Finance Disclosure Laws in the Internet Age, 27 J.L.& Pol. 557, 559 (2012).  In his view, because the questioning of disclosure requirements is in many cases "pretextual”, id. at 559, this Court must be closely watched, because if it appears to move away from transparency in any case involving public advocacy, the end could be near. The Court could be poised to water down the disclosure commitment expressed in Citizens United.

Meanwhile, the important doctrinal question of how to measure the costs as well as the benefits of compelled disclosure is passing out of focus.  There is general acceptance that harassment is a cognizable injury threatened by disclosure of a nonprofit association's members and donors, and that in Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S, 1 (1976) and Brown v. Socialist Workers ’74 Campaign Committee, 459 U.S. 87 (1982), the Supreme Court provided a remedy through exemptions that can be granted in particular cases to endangered speakers.  But on the question of how this exemption should be structured or operate, the differences are wide.