A lot of the yelling and screaming heard about McCutcheon has recently migrated into the debate about disclosure. Charles Krauthammer has complained that the zealots have ruined disclosure as a policy option by misusing donor information to launch attacks on them. And Brad Smith took to the webpages of the Center for Competitive Politics to refute the charge that on the question of mandatory disclosure, conservatives once open to transparency had reversed course, supposedly shifting with the winds now blowing against campaign finance regulation overall.

The State of Ohio is playing for time in its defense of its “false campaign statements” statute. It wants the case now before the Supreme Court decided on ripeness, win or lose; it wants to hold off a decision on the constitutionality of its law.  Some, Rick Hasen among them, believe that this might work.  But then again, it might not, and the law could well be put out to pasture without further ado.  The petitioner has argued in clear terms that the law is unconstitutional and that, on this point, the recent decision in United States v. Alvarez is dispositive.  Petition for Writ of Certiorari at 6-7, Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus, 134 S.Ct. 895 (2014) (No. 13-193).  And the Court could agree, motivated as well to spare the petitioner another expensive, time-consuming tour through the courts to win the victory that it is virtually guaranteed.

It certainly bears notice when the Federal Election Commission decides in bipartisan fashion a case brought by a Republican against a Democrat—(and vice versa, of course). The Commission did that recently, dismissing a Republican Senate candidate’s complaint that a Democratic gubernatorial candidate ran a soft-money attack ad against him.

The most recent issue of Election Law Journal offers interesting writing on lobbying. One of the articles, Money, Priorities and Stalemate: How Lobbying Affects Public Policy, is a study by Professor Frank R. Baumgartner and several colleagues who show that there is an unimpressive relationship between the resources devoted to lobbying and particular outcomes that the lobbyists had hoped to bring about. The authors do not suggest that the money put behind lobbying has no effect, only that we should understand better the nature of the effect and its limits. A number of factors, they argue, are relevant to the measurement of lobbying success, including the capacity of lobbyists to hold the attention of lawmakers who must choose among a broad range of issues in allocating their time. The co-authors of this study also stress that many of the advantages possessed by well-established interests are already "baked in" to public policy, and therein lies a major advantage: that it is much harder to change a policy than to establish one.

A conflict—the latest in the series—has broken out among FEC Commissioners about whether they have made public all relevant material on the General Counsel’s  view of Crossroads GPS and whether it is a "political committee."  In one report, the GC concluded that the evidence supported further investigation of the question, but the Commission deadlocked, and now a private lawsuit is looming.  Republicans seem to believe that the public record is incomplete and that the missing GC analysis would have a bearing on the legal merits of Crossroads’ position.   Whatever the facts of the matter, this ruckus reminds readers once again of the troubled condition of the Commission’s “case-by-case,” fact-specific approach to determining “political committee” status.