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.”

Just before the turn of the year, the Tenth Circuit decided that Citizens United, the organization, was entitled to the Colorado campaign finance law’s press exemption and so was not required to file public financial reports when producing and distributing a political documentary. Citizens United v. Gessler, 773 F.3d 200 (10th Cir. 2014). Colorado has construed the exemption broadly to apply to online publications and bloggers as well as to print and traditional media outlets.  But the State urged that the Court distinguish between entities about which the voters know or could easily learn something, and those hiding behind empty names lacking cue or content and having no extended operating history that listeners or views could consult for useful information.  The latter organizations—the “Citizens for a Better America” or “People for Justice” —are engaged in what it termed called “drop-in advocacy” during election seasons.

The Court, impressed with the distinction, still rejected its application to Citizens United. CU was well known; there was ample information available to anyone caring to seek it out, and the informational interest of voters was adequately protected. On its reading of Citizens United, the Court emphasized the interest supporting disclosure as the voters’ informational interest, not the deterrence of “corruption” or its appearance.

This raises the question: for purposes of the disclosure requirements based on the voter’s informational interest, is it possible to distinguish between an ongoing enterprise of known purpose and the shadowy “drop-in” advocacy group which is often here today and gone tomorrow?  And if it is, is that interest served primarily by disclosure of donors, or by other information about its organization and purposes?

Mark Schmitt has written an interesting piece, and Bruce Cain has briefly responded, on the surging skepticism among a distinguished group of scholars about the last decades of political reform.  Schmitt respects the skeptics’ work.  But he worries that they may also have succumbed to a dangerous naiveté.  He means that they may overstate the negative effects of recent reform efforts, as in diminishing the role of parties, and may make too much of what can be accomplished by countermeasures to strengthen the capacity for effective governance.  It is fine to say, as these skeptics do, that we should value more a messy and transactional politics by which consensus is forged and accomplishments are possible, but Schmitt insists that we proceed with care, lest we romanticize the time of shady backroom dealing rigged against anyone lacking money and privilege.

This warning seems premature: there is little cause to worry that these skeptics have gone too far, or that their prescriptions would usher in a new Gilded Age of opaque politics full of the risk of corruption and plutocratic control.  They still have a fair amount of work to do in pulling the conversation toward a reasonable “middle," away from the exaggerations and distortions of the political reform debate over many years.  One challenge has been overcoming the pressures on reform thought from the reform movement.

Common Cause has produced a report to show the involvement of the “religious right” in a systematic legal attack on campaign finance restrictions. At the center of the tale is lawyer Jim Bopp and around him are clients with passionate commitments who wish pursue them without financing limitations or disclosure.  Common Cause describes this as a “crusade.”

As a descriptive piece, there is nothing wrong with this report. The activities of Bopp and his clients are presented with reasonable accuracy, as far as one can tell.  But on another level, the report could be read to be making a political point—to imply that the religious right, waging this “crusade” against campaign finance, is exhibiting an unsavory zealotry on regulatory issues like the one some might attribute to its religious commitments. The word “crusade” is not here a throw -away.  It appears in the title of the Report, then again in the Executive Summary, and finally once more in the Conclusion.  It is an imputation to this cause of extremism.

The study by Emory’s Alan Abramovitz, recently discussed by Jonathan Bernstein, heavily discounts the effect of heavy outside spending on the 2014 Congressional elections. His conclusion: that the impact was zero or barely higher, and that the more significant factors were state-level presidential partisanship and incumbency.  But neither Abramovitz nor Bernstein mean to wave away the public policy or regulatory implications of campaign spending.  Candidates still need the money and ask for it, and questions are raised by their dependence on those who supply it.

Still, this study and others are useful reminders of a confusion in the campaign finance debate—the difference between conceptions of a healthy electoral process and worries about the corruption of government. It is not necessary to the importance of donors or spenders that they be clearly able to “buy elections."  It should be enough that their spending might sway the choice of the campaign issues raised and debated and determine the competitiveness of candidates associated with particular policy positions. This is not a question of the effect of their money on government, but on the electoral process itself.