It is understandable that the D.C. Circuit's Wagner decision upholding the federal contractor ban would attract a good bit of attention.  The federal courts are suspected of harboring animus toward the campaign finance laws and here is a major decision going the other way and on fairly broad grounds.  So it has been described as having the potential to be highly significant.

The decision was notable for the clarity and thoroughness of its presentation.  The Court also deftly reinforces the available authority by use of case law stressing the particular dangers presented by political pressure on, or from, government employees.  A strength, perhaps also a surprise, was the unanimity of the opinion.

It was also a relief to the decision’s admirers that the Court left open the question of whether federal contractors barred from contributing could make independent expenditures, or contribute to a Super PAC.  So this fight is for another day. Hopes have been raised within the reform community that the Court's emphasis on the special threats posed by federal contractors’ direct giving might justify limits on their independent spending.

This is one impression the case leaves – that without dissent, and for this class of contributors, the Court was prepared to affirm unambiguously affirm the government’s regulatory authority.  But then, after a step back, Wagner also illustrates how much excitement in this day and age of declining expectations about the campaign finance reform laws can develop around a case with limited practical effect that exposes problematic features of the current regulatory regime and its defense.

The press about super PACs is heating up: there are articles popping up all over the place—here, there, everywhere.  There is at once a general sense that major change is overtaking the campaign finance system, and no agreement about what it means or what, if anything, should be done about it.  So the old arguments continue.  Often they make no difference.  Sometimes they make matters worse.

Consider the recent decision issued by the United States District Court in Holmes v. Federal Election Commission, No. 14-1243(RMC), 2015 (WL 17788778 (D.D.C. April 20, 2015).  Holmes brought a complaint against the contribution limits in one particular and, some would argue, peculiar application.  Congress structured the limits on a "per election" basis:  indexed for inflation, the individual per election limit is now $2700, $2600 in the last cycle.  But this limit works differently for different classes of candidates.  A candidate actually or effectively unopposed in the primary can collect a full contribution for that non-event, then immediately collect the same amount from the same contributor for the general and spend all of it in the later election---a sensible move, because she has no other election in which to spend it.  The opposing candidate who must struggle through the primary will use up the limit for that election and have only $2700 left for the general.

Holmes believes that this is wrong, and a constitutional wrong at that: that it denies her the right to commit the full lawful amount to the candidate she supports in the general election, and that it advantages incumbents who are most likely to avoid primary competition.  The Court disagreed, characterizing her challenge as a "veiled" attack on the contribution limits overall.

A few years ago, after the enactment of McCain Feingold, the Federal Election Commission began issuing implementing rules, and there were not well received in reform quarters.  It was objected that the agency was ignoring Congressional intent and gutting the law.  One line of attack was possible Hill intervention to disapprove the rules pursuant to the Congressional Review Act.   At a lunch with Senators to discuss this possibility, a prominent reform leader told the assembled legislators that if they did not reject the rules and hold the FEC to account, the public “would rise up” in protest. The public uprising did not occur, neither the Senate nor the House took action, and the reform critics took their cases to court—with some but not complete success.

But the hope for public pressure remains alive, and as Matea Gold reports in The Washington Post, there is some thought that with Super PACs and the like, things have gotten so out of hand that voters will insist on action.  The ranking of campaign finance among other priorities important to voters remains low, but by one reading, it is inching up the list.  Any upward movement is taken to be, maybe, a sign of more popular passion to come.  This is always the wish.  In the annals of modern campaign finance, it is never a wish come true.

But campaign finance history also shows that elected officials can be moved to take up this cause, and the same Post story that speculates about changes in public opinion records, more concretely, restiveness on the part of politicians.  And this could make a difference.  Candidates and officeholders cited in the story, such as Senator Lindsey Graham, worry about the small number of Americans—“about a 100 people”-- who can shape the course of a campaign with their money.  The issue for Senator Graham is not, apparently, the cost to political equality: it is the unfairness to candidates who find that these wealthy activists “are going to be able to advocate their cause at the expense of your cause.”

The Brennan Center regularly devotes space to a review of the literature on the money-in-politics debate, and this week, Benjamin Brickner discusses an insightful paper on “coordination” by Professor Michael Gilbert of the University of Virginia and Brian Barnes, a J.D. candidate there.  The authors present the case that anti-coordination rules don’t operate to prevent corruption achieved through independent spending--and that they can’t, even if strengthened.  There are too many ways around coordination restrictions: a spender can comply with the law, spending “independently” for a candidate, but still offer the politician value that can be “cashed in” later.  If coordination rules do not deter corruption but do limit speech, then their constitutionality is thrown into question.

It is not difficult for an independent group to figure out what the politician may need and appreciate. Public sources of useful information are plentiful and these can be supplemented by private polling and other expert advice; and if there is a risk of missing the mark and timing or targeting an ad imperfectly, there remains value to be conveyed.  As Gilbert and Barnes point out, this is a question only of the efficiency of the expenditure, and some ground can be made up by just spending more money.  A politician can still be grateful for $75,000 of discounted benefit from an ad that cost $100,000.  As Gilbert and Barnes frame the point, “[U]nless the law prohibits candidates from publicizing their platforms and strategies, and outsiders from paying attention, then outsiders will always have enough information to make expenditures that convey at least some value.”

The Super PAC is the leading issue in campaign finance, and this is only superficially because it is new, exotic and, to many who write about it, alarming.  It has without question brought to head the fault line running through the contribution-expenditure distinction and expedited the obsolescence of the Buckley framework.  And it is forcing the question of whether we should be concerned in campaign finance about corruption or its appearance, or perhaps about something else.  And the answer is “something else.”