In a Washington Post piece, Rick Hasen argues that if the aggregate individual contribution limits fall in the McCutcheon case, the results could be both good and bad.  To the good: parties could raise and spend more freely, and therefore would be strengthened when more vigorous parties are needed to temper polarization and alleviate governing gridlock.  To the bad: “more” corruption would result from expanded large donor influence over the political process.  Rick wishes that the two goals, clean but also functional politics, could be achieved in tandem, but with the Supreme Court’s  limitation on Congress’s authority to prevent corruption, he is convinced that we might have to accept more corruption in return for possibly better government.

Back and forth go the arguments over alternatives to the current Court’s campaign finance jurisprudence.   The scholarship it produces can be interesting, and the passions behind it lively, but the question always remains whether constitutional theory can result in manageable guidance to the Court.  This key question is one that Larry Lessig and others advancing an originalist anti-corruption theory of jurisprudence have had difficulty answering.  Without this answer, their work encourages hard-core opponents of any regulation to believe, or to claim, that  the alternative to Buckley—and to the current Court’s gloss on Buckley—is effectively limitless government authority to restrict spending on politics. 

The Center for Responsive Politics and the Sunlight Foundation have teamed up to preview the consequences if the Supreme Court in McCutcheon eliminates the biennial aggregate limit. Their work is the latest of a number of analyses predicting trouble without the limit.  It is also the most recent of its kind to exhibit the flaws in these predictions—and to suggest that the real concern with McCutcheon may lie elsewhere.

Public Citizen attempts to make the case that the Supreme Court's pending decision in McCutcheon could, if wrongly decided, unleash a flood of money with the probable effect of corrupting the political process. The argument is the one heard before in briefs and in oral argument about joint fundraising committees. A donor who gives to a joint fundraising committee can write a check for millions, to be apportioned within the limits among all the joint fundraising participants. Public Citizen warns against "naïveté": the more “practical” view it urges is that the officeholder who solicits for the joint fundraising committee risks corruptive indebtedness to the donor.

The McCutcheon case continues to stir up comment about the hypotheticals the Justices used at oral argument to debate the need for an aggregate limit. Zac Morgan at the Center for Competitive Politics takes on one such hypothetical and suggests that it does not illustrate the need for any such limit. He correctly contends that the anti-earmarking and anti-proliferation provisions of the statute would apply with or without an aggregate limit to prevent the violation the hypothetical was meant to suggest.