Campaign finance jurisprudence is intensely concerned with free speech rights, less and decreasingly with associational rights, and not at all with a more comprehensive conception of the requirements for conducting political action—“doing politics.” Why this is so is worth exploring. Something is missing here, and the gap is consequential.

In a policy paper just published by the Cato Institute, John Samples takes up the constitutional amendments proposed in response to Citizens United and attempts to expose their dangers. Samples, a distinguished scholar of campaign finance, has much to offer here, regardless of where a reader stands on the feasibility of these proposals. It may be true, as Samples writes, that the constitutional amendments he criticizes “provide answers to constitutional questions, not a means for courts to reconsider those questions.” John Samples, Move to Defend: The Case against the Constitutional Amendments Seeking to Overturn Citizens United (April 2013) at 9. They do provide a means for others to reconsider those questions. And, in fact, Samples’ analysis leads him to return to first principles and to ask the question: what control should we entrust to the government in matters of campaign finance, and on what theory?

Mark Schmitt has replied effectively and thoughtfully to Ezra’s Klein’s warning about small donors and their politics. Klein contends that we are overlooking the polarizing tendencies of small contributions made by Americans at the extremes of our politics. He argues that, just as small donations are becoming the stuff of myth, big money, while more “corrupting,” gets less credit than it should for pushing against polarization: “Big money often wants the two parties to get along” whereas small money exacerbates political divisions. Schmitt questions Klein’s claims about the part that big or small fundraising plays in either promoting or lessening polarization—and he decries “cynicism about money and reform that seems to be infecting the wonk class.”