In this pre-Labor Day period when blogging will be light, here are a few notes:

1. Robert Mutch, who has written extensively about the history of campaign finance, has now published a guide to law and rules, Campaign Finance: What Everyone Needs to Know, just published by Oxford University Press. He means “everyone.” It is a citizen’s manual, with accessible explanations of abstruse statutory regulatory, and case law material, a chronology of major developments, and a glossary of key terms. He also provides throughout comments on the campaign finance reform debate. Mutch has a point of view on reform issues--who doesn’t?--but it is not harmful to his project. It adds a little zest to the discussion and more interest, therefore, for the general reader.  That reader has long deserved a resource like this, and here it is, courtesy of Robert Mutch.

2. That same general reader might want to puzzle over some of features of the well-worn law that is Mutch’s subject. An interesting case now on appeal to the Supreme Court, which goes by the name of a plaintiff with an unambiguous politics--Stop Reckless Economic Instability Caused by Democrats--questions why it is that political committees in existence for at least six months, so-called “multicandidate” committees, may give upon passing out of their infancy more to candidates but less to political parties (provided they also meet other minimal conditions on the level of support received and given).  The multi-candidate committee satisfying this 6-month waiting period can give a candidate another $2300 per election, for a total per election limit of $5,000. But its contributions to national and state parties are substantially cut from $32,400 to $5,000 and from $10,000 to $5,000, respectively.

Talk about the corrupt politician is usually concerned with the exploitation of public position for personal gain. He misuses his office, or makes that promise, because he is dealing for himself—looking for personal profit or a political advantage, and leaving to the side the public interest he should be representing. And for the most part, he is condemned.

But if he stops short of that and engages in undesirable conduct to win his office and “get things done,” then the sense is that we are in the presence of the usual nasty stuff politics is made of, such as a certain amount of deceit and double-dealing and promise-breaking and just “hardball.”  It is widely, if not happily, accepted that the morality of politics is of a different kind, and politicians, effective ones, have no choice but to behave periodically in unattractive ways-- politics being what it is.

We also assume that there are limits the politician should observe. We would want the politician to exhibit, privately or publicly, a “habit of reluctance,” a discomfort with the moral costs of behaving certain ways. The fear would be that if there were no such reluctance, there would be, in the words of Bernard Williams, no “obstacle to the happy acceptance of the intolerable.” “Politics and Moral Character,” in Moral Luck (1981), at 63. The Nixon White House that arranged for sophomoric “dirty tricks,” like flooding an opponent’s state headquarters with unwanted pizzas, could and did slide toward far more serious misdeeds.  And the Nixon example shows that the moral choices in a campaign are not irrelevant to the choices made in governing.

Where in all these considerations does Donald Trump fit in? As a candidate and now the nominee of a major party, he has engaged in and made a splashy display of tactics that include notable carelessness with or disregard of facts, vicious personal behavior toward others, and threats to do personal harm (as in threatening to expose Ted Cruz’s wife etc.) He has drawn the charge of being a “demagogue” and a “bully”, of being “vulgar” and grossly irresponsible in the tactics he favors and the policies he advocates. What is left unclear is whether he is like Nixon, or he is a special case.

Justice Ginsburg’s recent press comments have been noted mostly for her openly expressed disdain for the Trump candidacy. Less surprising in the remarks was the Justice’s “impossible dream” that Citizens United be overturned. She has said this before, and since she dissented in that case, there is not much news here, unless anyone still had doubts that for this Justice, the killing off of that decision is a priority.

The comment was reported at the same time as the Complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission by Representative Ted Lieu and others who intend to set into motion the reconsideration the Justice is hoping for. And so it invites an appraisal of its prospects for accomplishing the Justice Ginsburg’s “impossible dream.”

As my colleague Marc Elias has pointed out, the FEC cannot succeed; this is a lost cause. When the Complaint fails, it may do little more than unnecessarily promote the belief that CU is here to stay. It is not clear why this is the best legal maneuver, or the most effective exercise in public communications, in the attack on Speechnow and Citizens United.

Aside from the question of strategy, the Complaint itself  is a surprisingly subdued performance. It has a bit the feel of going-through-the-motions: doing the least possible to set up the agency dismissal and the move to the courts. True, the Complainants knew that the outcome at the agency was inevitable and there is time later to build their argument. But the case they preview in the Complaint seems flat and this certainly can’t help the Complainants in their subsequent appeal.

This is one view of the effects of modern political reform, and here is another, and their conclusions are, in a sense, similar: reforms have not worked as intended. But they don’t have in mind the same failures.

Robert Samuelson thinks the reforms have weakened the political system, undermining political parties and blocking other channels for constructive compromise and effective governance. Isaac Arnsdorf argues that, in the case of lobbying reform, the laws have worsened corrupt practice, not curbed it, and he is most exercised by legislators' ability to wield influence for private profit after leaving office.

The one commentator thinks we have government enfeebled by the unforeseen effects of reform; and the other sees reform to have left government more corrupt. Both analyses travel the familiar route of making a point that it invites the reader to take too far.

In an article just published in Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch argues that modern political reform has contributed to a disastrously weakened capacity for responsible, functional self-governance.The damage has been done to critically needed intermediary institutions, such as parties, whose effectiveness depend on allowances and practices now associated with old-style politics: less transparency in the conduct of government business, more resources for parties and their leadership, more of a role for party leaders and elites in screening candidates, and more flexibility for congressional leaders to utilize tools like "pork" to induce cohesion in the legislative ranks. The result of the change has been what he calls “chaos syndrome.”

Rauch does not claim that the reforms all without merit, or that we can or should leapfrog back to the end of the 19th or early 20th century. But, he says, by scaling back or adjusting certain of these reforms, something can be done to restore functionality to our politics—to contain the “chaos.”

Writing perceptively about this problem of reform’s “unintended consequences, ” Rauch recognizes that there are “other, larger trends” in the political culture responsible for this syndrome. For example, he cites the “politphobes” among voters who are convinced that there are clear remedies, beyond reasonable disagreement, to the nation’s ills, and that only the politicians and their political shenanigans and dark conspiracies have gotten in the way. He faults the reforms, for exacerbating this and other problems, just as he appreciates that revisions in the 1970’s reform model won’t somehow alone bring order out of the chaos.

It would be mistake, and maybe a trap, if Rauch’s analysis were taken to call only for re-evaluation of reforms already enacted. The argument taken primarily in that direction is sure to activate the same tired debates, feeding into the standard fear that politicians, "rolling back" reforms,  are taking care of themselves at everyone else’s expense. No less important is bringing Rauch’s analysis into a discussion of the proposal of new reforms.