When New York Times columnist Tom Edsall wrote recently about the winners and losers in each phase of campaign finance, he reminded readers how things have often turned out differently than predicted.  Not every projection was wrong, of course: some experts were right to imagine that the parties would decline and “outside groups” would prosper after McCain-Feingold.  But in the particulars, and especially after the courts began carving up the new law, the changes have included surprises, like the coming of Super PACs.  Now there is an interest in adjustments to respond to the unexpected and undesirable, and the reinvigoration of political party organizations has received the most attention.

How far to go is an outstanding question among those who favor aid to parties.  The Brennan Center counsels against substantial increases in contribution limits or doing away with the limits completely.  Heather Gerken and Joey Fishkin concur.  They worry that greatly expanded sources of private funding for parties could be a mistake, and as their writing on campaign finance is always fresh and provocative, it is well worth exploring their concerns.

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 doctrinal architecture of campaign finance is straining under the pressure of adapting to new realities. Most of the hard questioning has been expended on the faded distinction between contributions and expenditures and its relationship to free speech values.  It is all thoroughly familiar by now: the contribution which is “speech by proxy”, entitled to less protection, and the independent expenditure which is more pure speech and, while subject to disclosure requirements, cannot be put under dollar limits.  How the money is spent is the controlling inquiry: who spends it is less important, and Citizens United pushed this point harder in holding that free speech rights don't depend on the identity of the speaker.

The hole in this analysis is the absence of attention to the activity of politics—the "doing of politics.”   People who come together are doing more than speaking: they are doing politics, acting in concert to effect political goals.   This is a dimension of First Amendment jurisprudence that is normally covered in discussion of the freedom of association.  But attention to association has been fleeting, largely disappearing from Supreme Court jurisprudence, and when it reappears, it often collapses back into the free speech-centered jurisprudence that has reigned for decades now. The associational right is treated as expressive association, just the association that enables participants in group efforts to amplify their individual "views."

An account of doing politics may seem in the first instance to serve only a broadened perspective of First Amendment protections.  On this view, it is another weight placed on the scales against regulation. But it is also a way to think about what is really happening in the conduct of politics, and to relate it to the goals and limits—both the goals and limits—of regulation. And it seems especially useful now when a new Super PAC donor, one refusing to play “second fiddle,” lays claim to a commanding position in electoral politics.

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.”

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.