The Washington Post sensibly suggests that campaign finance reform policy must be recast and that this a job for Congress. The paper’s perspective on the current state of affairs is bleak. Post editors are unhappy with the permissive rulings of the Supreme Court and about the expanded realm of what is often, usually imprecisely, referred to as "dark money." But their emphasis is on "new ways" to improve the law and its enforcement. They suggest a focus on transparency and they call on Republicans who will soon control the Congress to reconsider their reversal on disclosure policies.

To Michael Malbin’s credit, he is taking seriously the political parties’ complaint about the terms under which they must compete for resources and influence with “outside” or independent groups. He accepts that a “rebalancing” is in order, and he proposes a compromise: more room for parties to coordinate their spending with candidates, in return for tighter enforcement of coordination rules against independent expenditure groups. He calls this a “third approach” to reform that which rejects both full de-regulation of party spending and any frontal challenge to the constitutional protections for independent spending.

When the Supreme Court took up the McCutcheon case, and again when it was decided, commentators suggested that the Court might be poised to reconsider the constitutional foundations of contribution regulation. The Justices had done what they needed to do to expand and solidify the right to independent spending; now they would turn their attention, in the same deregulatory spirit, to contribution limits, perhaps laying the foundation for invalidating them. McCutcheon does not by its terms really justify this fear. It did direct attention to the question of how—and not whether—contributions are regulated. And other cases percolating in the court system have begun to confront those questions.

To Linda Greenhouse, the Court’s decision to take up a new challenge to the Affordable Care Act is political—not Bush v. Gore all over again, but worse. While disagreeing with Bush v. Gore, she was prepared to make allowances for it: there was, she writes, at least a “plausible argument” for that case.

This is not the first time that Greenhouse has minimized the significance of Bush v. Gore. On the tenth anniversary of the decision, she referred to it “not as a travesty or tragedy, but as a bad hair day.” While taking issue with the decision, which she terms “ludicrous,” she sees it as a mishap, a bad result into which the Court simply blundered. Or just happenstance: a “bad hair day” at the Court.

Commentators who don’t agree about campaign finance don’t disagree about every aspect of it. Reformers and their opponents both accept this much: that Americans distrust politicians and suspect the “undue influence” of money over their behavior. But that’s as far the shared view goes: from there, conclusions diverge. It is a remarkable fact about campaign finance—and a reason for the persistent divisions over law and policy—that general agreement on a fundamental point about money in politics can produce disagreement on the question of whether reform is needed.

Consider: