Here are three recent lines of argument about campaign finance, two of them in response to McCutcheon and one of them about the escalating conflict between the FEC Commissioners.  Each is interesting in its own way; they are also constituent parts of the basic, most frequently heard defense of the Watergate-era regulatory program.

The decision in  McCutcheon  has not been the only source of lively rhetoric in the world of campaign finance. The FEC's commissioners took to very open squabbling, putting their cases in Statements of Reason and elaborating on them in op-eds and letters placed with the New York Times. The conflict in this instance involved Commissioner Ravel on one side and all of the Republican commissioners on the other, and they swiped at each other in strong terms over the properly defined responsibility of FEC Commissioners and the role of courts.

Rick Hasen has made an important contribution to the debate about McCutcheon by astutely identifying an issue that had gone mostly unremarked—the Court’s choice to reduce the doctrinal heft of the “appearance of corruption” in step with its narrowed view of “actual corruption.”  With the equation of “actual” corruption with quid pro quo corruption, Rick believes, the concern with appearances had to take up the slack in addressing “the public’s concern that money can skew legislative outcomes.”  Twice in his piece, Rick refers to a “stand-in” function for appearances—a role in standing in for the decimated actual corruption standard that is no longer capable of dealing with the “broader concern about undue influence.”

Beyond the various points of disagreement between Chief Justice Roberts’ plurality opinion and Justice Breyer’s dissent in McCutcheon, there is one striking, overall contrast to be drawn. Roberts makes a clear case against the aggregate contribution limits but, as Justice Thomas suggests, he may be less straightforward in revealing his doctrinal ambitions.  Breyer’s jurisprudential orientation is no mystery, but his defense of it, in the particulars, is a puzzle.

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.