There are two problems, one closely related to the other, with Rick Hasen’s Supreme Court-centered analysis of how the campaign finance reforms of the 1970s have fallen on hard times. The first, discussed here, is that the Court cannot bear all of the blame. The law ran into difficulties from the beginning, and it is primarily in recent years, when problems with the law had become evident, that the Court majority has given the Watergate-era statute a hard push toward collapse. It may well be that Justices hostile to the law in principle were pleased to be presented with the opportunity to pick it apart. But there was ample opportunity.

But now, having assigned so much fault to the Court, Rick is virtually required to build a reform program around changing its composition.  Progressives have a 5-4 problem now, and all it would take to solve it is one more vote. He states his point like this:

It likely will take a progressive Supreme Court reversing Citizens United and Buckley to provide the opportunity to enact comprehensive campaign reform and then to see the effects of more than a half-hearted reform upon governance.

Is this a viable or promising reform strategy?  Recent experience suggests it is not.

When Governor Scott Walker ended his Presidential candidacy, which happened after Rick Perry suspended his, commentators marveled that they could be done for and have well funded Super PAC still idling nearby.  It has been assumed that a conclusion was ready to be drawn—the more conclusive, the better.  The proposition that Super PACs rule the world has met with the objection that, no, they really don’t, not as we once thought.

Case in point: a piece in Salon, whose author, Sean Illing, wishes to show that, as the title states, Plutocrats still Reign, and that Walker’s withdrawal is no “defeat” for their Super PACs.  Very few commentators actually argued that Walker’s downfall signaled the end of plutocratic control.  If not that, then, what does the Walker’s withdrawal have to teach about the power and limits of Super PACs?

The court’s worst blunder, she said, was its 2010 decision in Citizens United "because of what has happened to elections in the United States and the huge amount of money it takes to run for office.”

This is what Justice Ginsburg has said, but is not clear without a bit of guesswork which she means.  But it seems to be about “what has happened to elections", including cost, and not so much how the conduct of elections translates into bad or corrupt government.  One cannot read too much into it: the comment is short, but her few words describe a problem with the electoral process.

Distortion of that process, or the interference with its ideal functioning, is a major worry for those observing money in politics, separate from any consequences for the integrity of government that the politicians, once elected, are responsible for running. This electoral corruption of elections is different from the quid pro quo corruption of government that animates the strictly constitutional and legal debate.

In Friday’s New York Times, Stuart Stevens refers to just the electoral impacts of campaign finance when discussing the effects of Super PACs in altering the character of Presidential primary competition.  A number of the now 17 candidates entering the Republican Presidential primary have jumped in with the confidence that, with a Super PAC at their side, they have the resources to hang in there for a spell. Doing well in the first primaries is no long an invariable condition of viability.  Stevens is not all that worried about it: he likes the free-for-all.  Others are less sure.

These understandings of “corruption” can be, and often are, conflated, but are very different.  The case against Super PACs as agents for electoral corruption is straightforward: a handful of individuals can float a candidacy lacking in more general public support and keep it artificially alive.  The costs increase for other candidates; debate stages are crowded with contenders who are not truly viable over the long-term; and the mechanism by which public preference is measured is skewed.

Perhaps for this reason, it goes unnoticed that arguments directly related to government corruption—and proposals for reform based on them—seem, by contrast, increasingly clouded and tenuous.

It is understandable that the D.C. Circuit's Wagner decision upholding the federal contractor ban would attract a good bit of attention.  The federal courts are suspected of harboring animus toward the campaign finance laws and here is a major decision going the other way and on fairly broad grounds.  So it has been described as having the potential to be highly significant.

The decision was notable for the clarity and thoroughness of its presentation.  The Court also deftly reinforces the available authority by use of case law stressing the particular dangers presented by political pressure on, or from, government employees.  A strength, perhaps also a surprise, was the unanimity of the opinion.

It was also a relief to the decision’s admirers that the Court left open the question of whether federal contractors barred from contributing could make independent expenditures, or contribute to a Super PAC.  So this fight is for another day. Hopes have been raised within the reform community that the Court's emphasis on the special threats posed by federal contractors’ direct giving might justify limits on their independent spending.

This is one impression the case leaves – that without dissent, and for this class of contributors, the Court was prepared to affirm unambiguously affirm the government’s regulatory authority.  But then, after a step back, Wagner also illustrates how much excitement in this day and age of declining expectations about the campaign finance reform laws can develop around a case with limited practical effect that exposes problematic features of the current regulatory regime and its defense.

By petitioning their own agency for a rulemaking, Commissioners Weintraub and Ravel have found a novel way to charge their colleagues with fecklessness. Call it a populist gesture: they are stepping out of their roles as administrators and issuing their appeal from the outside, as members of the general public. They may have done all they could or intended to do with this Petition, which was to publicize their grievances. Or they may have sought to add to public understanding of the grounds of this grievance-to enlighten and inform, and not only turn up the volume of their complaint.

A first point—minor but worth considering-- is whether this agency needs another quirky procedural controversy. What does it mean for two Commissioners, one of whom is agency Chair, to dispense with their formal roles and petition as citizens, filing a petition on plain paper without their titles and just the Commission’s street address? Will they recuse themselves from voting on the petition as Commissioners? Will they testify before themselves?

One explanation provided to USA Today is that it will allow for a hearing at which the general public will be heard. But such a hearing has been held, and the Chair could have unilaterally arranged for another, as she did recently in convening a forum on the role of women in politics.

The answer to this may be no more than: it does not matter, because the Petition serves only to make a point. A sympathetic observer would call it a cri de coeur; one less sympathetic might see it as a PR maneuver. What might unite the two sides is merely their agreement, for entirely different reasons, that the Commission is not in good working order. The risk of the petition initiative is that rather than move the discussion to a better place (hard as that is), it sends a dreary message about the state of the agency.