Tom Edsall’s is the latest of a series of pieces purporting to explain the paralyzing conflicts over campaign finance regulation, and his culprit is the Republican Party.  Republicans, he argues, have shifted positions as they have become more dependent on large donations to meet the rising costs of campaigns. And there are more of those massive sums to be had now that the Court has opened the doors to rapidly escalating independent and nonprofit group activity.  Edsall suggests that while the Republican Party was once a leader in the attraction of small donors and partial to mandated disclosure, the GOP has now been driven by self-interest to a position of unyielding opposition to the regulation across-the-board.

In their new Brookings paper, Tom Mann and Tony Corrado wish to debunk the notion that changes in campaign finance law could temper political polarization.  They dispute the suggestion that more money to political parties would better equip party leaders to run their caucuses.  Then they turn attention to small donors and question the belief that these sources of giving, rallied by “partisan taunting and ideological appeals,” exacerbate political division.  Id. at 15.  In sum, Mann and Corrado warn against relaxing protections against big money influence.  It won’t help strengthen the parties, they say, and it is wrong to assume that a reliance on smaller donations will worsen polarization.

Defenders of faltering campaign finance regulation have been put to the test in answering the widening doubts about the intended or unintended effects of McCain-Feingold. Now they face a new challenge: the need to deny that weakened parties and their leadership could benefit in a polarized politics from enhanced fundraising capacity to counter the influence of outside groups and instill discipline among their members.

Heather Gerken writes clearly and with invigorating common sense about issues that aren't routinely given such treatment. She has set out to correct misreadings of Citizens United and she has an alternative reading of its importance. Rather than getting caught up in dreary doctrinal squabbles, she is calling for attention to the adjustments that campaign finance law and doctrine have induced political actors to make and the consequences for political institutions and the distribution of political power. Heather is progressive in her politics but refreshingly practical. In her Marquette Law lecture, she argues that by re-interpreting (or clarifying) the anti-corruption interest, Citizens United has helped move power to “shadow parties,” weakening the traditional political party and distancing the primary party actors in these shadows from the “party faithful” once relied on to press doorbells and hit the streets.

First libertarian party committees, then the Republican National Committee, filed a suit last week to claim for political parties the advantages enjoyed by Super PACs. Each wishes to raise unlimited individual funds for “independent expenditures.”  The cases are a predictable consequence of Speechnow.org v. FEC: these party committees are arguing that what is good for the outside groups should be good for them, so long as they are also spending independently of their candidates.