Some of the Federal Election Commission’s work is simple, much of it hard, and it receives little credit for the difficulty it faces on major questions.  What is before the Commission tomorrow is among the simpler questions it faces: it is not glamorous, but because it involves independent expenditures and disclosure requirements, it is not insignificant.

The question is: how do reporting requirements apply to an independent expenditure made on a nationwide basis during the presidential primary season, clearly not intended to influence a particular state's primary?  The FEC has advised in the past that the cost should be divided among all states’ primaries that are pending, and the share attributed to each state should be reported as made to influence its primary.  FEC Advisory Opinion 2011-28 (2011).  This reporting procedure affects the legal obligations to report on a 24-or 48-hour basis independent expenditures made within specified periods before an election, and also the reporting of "electioneering communications."

Now the FEC is being asked to consider changing course, and to have the national expenditure reported as what it is – – a national expenditure.

Fred Wertheimer remains indignant about Citizens United and he certainly comes by this view honestly.  He has been strongly for campaign finance regulation since the 1970s and had a hand in lobbying its successful passage in the first place.  It is not surprising that he is very distressed by the watered-down definition of corruption articulated by the Court first in Citizens United and then with more clarity and emphasis in the “we-mean-what-we-said” restatement in McCutcheon.

Wertheimer says in this new piece what he has said before about “legalized bribery” being the product of the Court’s fecklessness and naiveté.  This charge is familiar, and some object that it is tired and unproductive, but Wertheimer adds to this complaint another: that the decision unleashed “political chaos”.

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.

In judging the Robert’s Court record on campaign finance, Rick Hasen finds that progressives have little to cheer about, except that it might have been worse.  He looks into the reasons why the Court majority has moved more slowly toward deregulation than some might have predicted, and, as one might expect, his analysis is insightful. Election Law’s Path in the Roberts Court’s First Decade: A Sharp Right Turn But with Speed Bumps and Surprising Twists (August 4, 2015). UC Irvine School of Law Research Paper No. 2015-70. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2639902. But he also assigns the Court heavy responsibility for the state of reform.  Hasen writes that, as a result of decisions like Citizens United and McCutcheon, the Roberts Court majority has “caused the existing campaign finance system to slowly implode,” launching reform into a” death spiral” and erecting “structural impediments” that prevent further reform.

To be sure, the Court’s rulings have contributed to the collapse of the ‘70s reforms, and there is no doubt that its jurisprudence complicates the pursuit of reform programs—that is, certain reform programs that follow the very Watergate-era model that has largely come apart.  But an account focused on the Court skips to the middle of the story; it leaves too much out.

In the wake of the Wisconsin case, and in the arguments more generally about “’coordination,” it has been suggested that not too much should be made of the dangers of criminal investigation in campaign finance cases.  Hard-charging investigative techniques employed in the service of creative theories of liability are staples of white-collar criminal enforcement.  Why, critics such as Rick Hasen ask, should campaign finance law enforcement be different?

The question of whether criminal campaign finance investigations are just like any other is worth careful consideration, detached from a lively, high-stakes conflict like Wisconsin’s.  The federal experience is instructive.