Defenders of faltering campaign finance regulation have been put to the test in answering the widening doubts about the intended or unintended effects of McCain-Feingold. Now they face a new challenge: the need to deny that weakened parties and their leadership could benefit in a polarized politics from enhanced fundraising capacity to counter the influence of outside groups and instill discipline among their members.

First libertarian party committees, then the Republican National Committee, filed a suit last week to claim for political parties the advantages enjoyed by Super PACs. Each wishes to raise unlimited individual funds for “independent expenditures.”  The cases are a predictable consequence of Speechnow.org v. FEC: these party committees are arguing that what is good for the outside groups should be good for them, so long as they are also spending independently of their candidates.

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.