In this pre-Labor Day period when blogging will be light, here are a few notes:

1. Robert Mutch, who has written extensively about the history of campaign finance, has now published a guide to law and rules, Campaign Finance: What Everyone Needs to Know, just published by Oxford University Press. He means “everyone.” It is a citizen’s manual, with accessible explanations of abstruse statutory regulatory, and case law material, a chronology of major developments, and a glossary of key terms. He also provides throughout comments on the campaign finance reform debate. Mutch has a point of view on reform issues--who doesn’t?--but it is not harmful to his project. It adds a little zest to the discussion and more interest, therefore, for the general reader.  That reader has long deserved a resource like this, and here it is, courtesy of Robert Mutch.

2. That same general reader might want to puzzle over some of features of the well-worn law that is Mutch’s subject. An interesting case now on appeal to the Supreme Court, which goes by the name of a plaintiff with an unambiguous politics--Stop Reckless Economic Instability Caused by Democrats--questions why it is that political committees in existence for at least six months, so-called “multicandidate” committees, may give upon passing out of their infancy more to candidates but less to political parties (provided they also meet other minimal conditions on the level of support received and given).  The multi-candidate committee satisfying this 6-month waiting period can give a candidate another $2300 per election, for a total per election limit of $5,000. But its contributions to national and state parties are substantially cut from $32,400 to $5,000 and from $10,000 to $5,000, respectively.

In an article just published in Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch argues that modern political reform has contributed to a disastrously weakened capacity for responsible, functional self-governance.The damage has been done to critically needed intermediary institutions, such as parties, whose effectiveness depend on allowances and practices now associated with old-style politics: less transparency in the conduct of government business, more resources for parties and their leadership, more of a role for party leaders and elites in screening candidates, and more flexibility for congressional leaders to utilize tools like "pork" to induce cohesion in the legislative ranks. The result of the change has been what he calls “chaos syndrome.”

Rauch does not claim that the reforms all without merit, or that we can or should leapfrog back to the end of the 19th or early 20th century. But, he says, by scaling back or adjusting certain of these reforms, something can be done to restore functionality to our politics—to contain the “chaos.”

Writing perceptively about this problem of reform’s “unintended consequences, ” Rauch recognizes that there are “other, larger trends” in the political culture responsible for this syndrome. For example, he cites the “politphobes” among voters who are convinced that there are clear remedies, beyond reasonable disagreement, to the nation’s ills, and that only the politicians and their political shenanigans and dark conspiracies have gotten in the way. He faults the reforms, for exacerbating this and other problems, just as he appreciates that revisions in the 1970’s reform model won’t somehow alone bring order out of the chaos.

It would be mistake, and maybe a trap, if Rauch’s analysis were taken to call only for re-evaluation of reforms already enacted. The argument taken primarily in that direction is sure to activate the same tired debates, feeding into the standard fear that politicians, "rolling back" reforms,  are taking care of themselves at everyone else’s expense. No less important is bringing Rauch’s analysis into a discussion of the proposal of new reforms.

The Louisiana Republican Party has enlisted Jim Bopp to mount a challenge to campaign finance restrictions on state political parties and so it is widely assumed that this is a Trojan Horse lawsuit with much wider significance for the survival of McCain-Feingold.  And of course if the three-judge court, then eventually the Supreme Court, decide the case a certain way, it could well help doom the 1970’s reforms--if not immediately, then eventually.  Rick Hasen, among others, has embraced the doomsday scenario, and the reform community has communicated to the three-judge court just this view of the stakes.

All of this may be true but this case and likely others to follow point to the costs of the bitter, stalemated discussion of campaign finance policy.  Louisiana and its lawyers have a reasonable case against the regulatory burdens on state parties: they stress that the dissatisfaction with aspects of these rules is bipartisan.  Thoughtful observers have concluded, as Brookings scholars recently did, that reforms are required.

But on this, as on other campaign finance issues, there is little likelihood of progress: no serious legislative engagement and, outside the Congress, a sharply divided political debate that mainly sorts out into hardline “reform” and “anti-reform” camps. The fight has largely moved to the courts, and from the reformers’ perspective, and with some uncertainty after Justice Scalia’s passing, this serves to put at risk the entire Buckley framework.  But if the outcome there is muddled or inconclusive, what will continue is the slow, steady rot of a regulatory regime characterized by ambiguity, complexity and evasion.  Neither of the alternatives is desirable.

A Brookings Institution study of state parties, authored by Ray La Raja and Jonathan Rauch, is the latest of the sober commentaries on contemporary campaign finance.  La Raja and Rauch conclude that state parties have lost significant ground to outside groups and are impeded in large part by federal regulation, mostly by McCain-Feingold, in performing critical functions. They would like to see for these state parties increased or eliminated contribution limits, deregulation to enhance their ability to coordinate with candidates and to conduct ticket-wide activities, and perhaps even public financing measures in the form of tax deductible contributions.  The strengthening of state parties, they are convinced, can promote more moderate politics; it can offset to some extent the polarizing forces unleashed by “outside groups.”

It is a thoughtful report and a contribution to the growing consensus that campaign finance laws today are unworkable and in desperate need of reform.  The question is: are state parties, for the reasons given, an appropriately special focus of reform.

As the authors note, there are other reasons for the struggles of state parties and the rise of the outside groups.  Laws and rules may add to the problem but are not its exclusive cause. Much of what La Raja and Rauch say about state parties would apply to the parties as a whole, at the national as well as the state and local level, and there are other actors within the regulated system also clamoring with justification for relief from outdated, burdensome, and pointless regulatory limits.

The case for singling out the state parties rests on La Raja and Rauch’s belief that these organizations are “important nodes of the political equivalent of civil society,” capable of creating “social capital by building connections, trust, and cooperation across diverse individuals and groups.”

This is a strong claim.

This is the main point urged on the reader in this paper on Super PACs: they're unlikely to disappear, because they are product of the logic of Buckley rather than a distortion of it.  Without a major change in the constitutional law, it is difficult to see how significant limits on Super PACs can be legislated or brought about by regulatory fiat.  Moreover, the “anti-coordination” rules that many are calling for would entangle and damage political organizations other than super PACs and raise legitimate, serious free speech and association issues.

At the same time, there is room for reform--some adjustment to the regulatory process--that would account for the Super PACs’ emergence and widening impact.  Transparency measures can clearly identify for the public those single-candidate Super PACs operating with the candidate’s active support and involvement.  Additional resources could be made available to other actors--parties and others--that are now more regulated than Super PACs and, and in part for that reason, steadily losing ground to them. The goal would not be a deregulated campaign finance system but one that is more rationally structured and coherent.

Rick Hasen worries that the “cure may be worse than the disease.”  He is suspicious or concerned that this is a move to restore the soft-money days that McCain-Feingold was supposed to close out.  But the proposal is not inspired by special solicitude for parties.  Parties are one of a number of electorally active organizations that would benefit from an infusion of resources but there is no case for making them the only ones.  Targeted regulatory relief should be available for other membership-based organizations, and even to candidates when conducting particular voter mobilization activities.

What Rick and others overlook, minimize, or dispute is the role of reinvigorated associational activity in enhancing political equality--in advancing the goal of "the quality of inputs" that Rick champions.  In his very good book, Plutocrats United, Rick does not grapple with the dependence of political equality on organizing and other means of building political strength on numbers, particularly among the very population of citizens he is most concerned with: those with modest resources.  As Guy-Uriel Charles has summed up the significance of association, its “main principle…is that of effective aggregation: an individual must have a reasonable opportunity to join with like-minded others for the purpose of acquiring political power.”  Guy-Uriel E. Charles, Racial Identity, Electoral Structures, and the First Amendment Right of Association, 91 Cal. L. Rev. 1209, 1248-1249 (2003).