Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch has scattered few clues about his campaign finance jurisprudence. Commentators have had to make do with his concurrence in Riddle v. Hickenlooper, 742 F. 3d 922 (2014), a case involving a concededly defective Colorado law that discriminated against minor or independent candidates in the structure of contribution limits. Gorsuch’s concurrence could be read to question the more permissive standard of review that the Supreme Court in Buckley established for the defense of contribution limits. The Court allowed for scrutiny of contribution restrictions a step or more down from the strictest review: not attention to whether the government had a “compelling” interest and had “narrowly tailored” the means to achieve it, but a question of the state’s “sufficiently important interest” and the use of means that are “closely drawn.”

Gorsuch wrote in Hickenlooper that the two standards were “pretty close but not quite the same thing.” Id. at 931. To some observers, they seem not that close at all. They fear that any shift to a more rigorous standard would be the next and perhaps decisive blow to meaningful campaign finance regulation. The stakes, they believe, are high. But how high? And are there other questions to be raised about the political assumptions, perhaps also effects, of the leeway provided for the imposition of tight limits on contributions?

Rick Pildes asks whether in this time of "existential politics," when contestants for political power perceive the very "identity of the country… to be at stake," we might expect the steady degradation and eventual collapse of institutional norms. He is moved to this reflection by Judge Laurence Silberman's recent column on Jim Comey’s and Justice Ginsburg’s interventions in the 2016 political campaign. Judge Silberman charges each with disregard of norms, with having “bent with the political winds” in a storm. Silberman does not explicitly develop the theme of an existential politics, but Pildes rightly sees something like it playing in the background.

One other consequence of this brand of politics is the collapse of any agreement about the rules of political competition. For the existential warrior, these rules either cost too much--they just get in the way--or they require tighter alignment with self-interest. If, as Michael Gerson mockingly describes the mind-set, the nation is now in the midst of a “fourth turning, or maybe the fifth progression, or the third cataclysm,” or if the government threatens a turn toward fascism, there will be little patience in this fight for ground-rules that complicate the path to victory or successful resistance. As noted here, the progressive opposition may include campaign finance limits among its reform commitments, but how far can this go, if resources are thought essential to the project of stopping Trump?

The rejection of rules tends to be rationalized, and rationalization has been spreading. Last to go has been the acceptance for the need for disclosure; but it may be on the way out, as Republican and conservative critics argue that transparency requirements are devices that the administrative state has established for the surveillance of the political opposition. In this attack on disclosure, the President’s refusal to release his returns, while a rejection of norms and not of law, has put a fine point on the precarious position of transparency in the existential politics of the day.

The FEC got back into the news when Commissioner Weintraub issued a statement, posted to the FEC website and distributed via Twitter, that President Trump should produce some evidence to support his claim of voter fraud. An organization that calls itself Cause of Action filed a complaint with the FEC Inspector General, demanding an inquiry into whether the Commissioner’s expression of her views involved an impermissible diversion of government resources to a private political pursuit. Commissioner Weintraub replied that she would “not be silenced.”

One can only hope that in this demoralized agency, the IG finds better things to do. Just weeks ago, the President of the United States used Twitter to visit hell on a department store chain that discontinued his daughter's line of clothing. An FEC Commissioner’s use of a statement and a few hundred characters of twitter commentary to criticize the President’s voter fraud claims hardly seems the most compelling reason for concern about holding some line between the official and the personal.

Are Weintraub’s comments directly and squarely within the jurisdiction of the Commission, such that she can take some action in response to the President's failure to produce the requested evidence? No, but then again she rightly says that as a 13 year Commissioner, she should be free to take notice of any claims that bear on the integrity of elections. And she has tried, probably unnecessarily, to bolster her case by pointing out that anyone paying for busloads to come into New Hampshire to vote illegally may have committed a campaign finance violation.

FEC Commissioner Ravel came to town with every intention to make change and left in a state of disillusionment. She aspired to build fences and ran into a wall: The Republicans had no interest in cooperating in a progressive reform program, not even bringing “dark money” into the light. The Commissioner then took her case public, before the sympathetic audiences in the media, but this was a dead end. Republican Commissioners are not moved by op-eds in the New York Times. By the time of her resignation yesterday, Commissioner Ravel had made her name by stressing the pointlessness of expecting anything from her agency. She may have made little headway in advancing the cause of transparency in campaign finance, but she was very clear about her own views.

Her letter of resignation is a parting expression of her commitment to strengthened enforcement of campaign finance laws. It is also a last testament to the futility of her quest. She refers to various statements the President has made about the broken campaign finance system and urges him to prioritize reform among his domestic initiatives. Of course, Mitch McConnell runs the Senate and there is no chance of his agreement to the program she advocates of ending “dark money,” reversing Citizens United, public finance and a reinvigorated FEC.

The president to which she made this last appeal may or may not have meant what he said about campaign finance. He was a billionaire candidate who could spend freely: his “money in politics” was not restricted. But he did not win by swamping his foes with superior resources. Candidates with plenty of campaign money, like Jeb Bush, failed early. On the subject of election law, this president seems far more motivated by his belief in “voter fraud.”

There seems to be a question of whether the media should provide platforms for Administration spokespersons who regularly use the airtime to disseminate falsehoods. “Truth matters,” Margaret Sullivan writes, and she worries that viewers will come away misled, as some might have last Sunday after Stephen Miller’s appearance in which he repeated the charge of “serious” voter fraud. But Sullivan misses the point that the Administration should be given every opportunity to say what it will on this subject (and others). We might regret that some in the audience, predisposed to believe these claims, may mistake them for facts. But Miller, following Trump, is helping, by speaking, to clarify the nature of this initiative, and it is important that it be understood.

One consequence of clear understanding will be the disinclination of true experts to participate in this process. Few with credibility will be anxious to sign up to validate the work of a Commission launched to validate a conclusion already reached. And, as Miller made clear, this conclusion rests on what “everyone”--at least everyone in New Hampshire--knows. It is hard to imagine who will take this “everyone knows” school of election administration seriously and risk their reputations by enrolling in it.

In the normal case, when a Commission-in-the-making is virtually founded on the rejection of expertise, its bid for respectability would be a long shot. But when its political purpose is plain, because it is the creation of candidates pursuing their own self-interest, it has no hope. The President’s staunchest political allies might stay with him on this, and he can count on groups that thrive on allegations of fraud. In the wider world of administrators and experts, both Democratic and Republican, the prospects of having to engage with this Commission will inspire dread.

This leaves members of this community with a couple of choices.