The Brennan Center’s Daniel Weiner has called on the reform community to engage in self-examination and consider the changes that, in the light of the experience of this last election, are now due. He notes that money did not play the expected role, and that the role it did play, as in the case of Super PACs, underscores the imbalance between them and the political parties. He suggests that campaign finance reform could include additional liberalization of party financing. Weiner would proceed cautiously--he is not giving up on the Buckley regulatory model--but he and his colleagues at the Center have commendably tried to open up a wider, fresher discussion of reform alternatives.

But this may be the key sentence of his essay:

Finally, we should also be asking how campaign finance reform relates to the broader constellation of proposals to create a democracy that works for everyone. So many aspects of the 2016 election are deeply troubling, including documented voter suppression, the ongoing effects of partisan gerrymandering, and — at least for some — the fact that the winner of the popular vote lost the electoral college for the second time in under two decades. They call for solutions rooted in the same values of fairness, accountability, and inclusion that animate the strongest campaign finance reform ideas. It would be a great mistake to silo the latter from the broader push for a more just and equitable political system.

Weiner would have the reform enterprise be integrated--the campaign finance part would fit with the others. There would be no “silo,” in which, as one reformer once described another’s preoccupation with money-in-politics, campaign finance is THE thing. Campaign finance would have its place within a scheme of reform that is unified around the themes of fairness, accountability and inclusion. This is the shape of reform as Weiner envisions it in the “age of Trump.”

Missing from these otherwise sensible criteria for reform are the requirements of mobilization, of effective political action.   To insist that reform’s design must take into account the needs of political association and activism is not to consign to a lower rung, or to read out of the plan altogether, the values of "fairness, accountability and inclusion.”   But at a time when progressives are sobered by the looming contest over large questions of national values and policy, a reform compatible with the needs of an energetic politics seems fairly urgent.

With two elections within sixteen years won by the candidate who lost the popular vote, it is a natural turn that the Electoral College moves higher on the reform agenda. There remain other items for consideration: the state of the political parties, campaign finance, and voting rights. The question is: in what ways will the substance of reform, and its timing or tactics, be affected by the outcome of this election?

1. Attention to the Electoral College is now heightened at a time of mounting impatience with the other ways in which the electoral process deviates from the expectation that the most votes should decide. James Ceaser has correctly said that we've arrived at the point in our political culture that it is, if not unthinkable, difficult in the extreme to stand against the principle that the person with the most votes wins. So Republican leadership balked at any program to stop Trump at least in part because they struggled to explain how the nomination could somehow be denied to the candidate in a field of 17 who won by far the most contests and the most votes. The Democrats have run into similar problems with the role of super-delegates.

The case against the Electoral College is strengthened considerably by this strong trend in popular expectation. Whether we will see sustained momentum for reform is a different question.

2. Meanwhile, what about the parties? Ezra Klein has come to the view that parties may be weak but partisanship runs high, and that this complicated combination explains a good bit of what some see to have gone wrong with the nominating processes. Parties do not mediate voter choice: it is not accepted that they should step in against the candidates the voters favor and compel an alternative choice presented as superior in experience, governing credentials, or electability. So the voters decide, and once they have decided, the parties and their partisan fall into line. As Klein explains it, this is the worst of all worlds: weak parties, high partisanship.

The absence of strong parties on the traditional model has been keenly felt in this way, and perhaps in other less visible ones. For example, candidates now rely upon polling data to shape strategy and to adjust as necessary to changed political conditions. All of this is done at headquarters, shaped by sophisticated analytics. And the analytics are highly advanced. A modern campaign cannot operate without them. But genuinely strong parties are built on something more. They would have good intelligence "on the ground" delivered by seasoned party officials and operatives. The state and local party would speak authoritatively on local conditions. It pick up quickly on changes in those conditions not easily accessible through polling.

The Brennan Center Report on the state of disclosure, “Secret Spending in the States,” usefully examines transparency policy issues presented by high-impact spending in low-information contests at the state and local level. It argues that dark money is not the only problem and focuses on the additional questions raised by "gray money" – –funding disclosed by reporting entities but received from organizations giving no indication of the interest or funding behind them. The Report then selects examples from various states of dark money and gray money controversies or issues. The Center sets out a program of reform and points to some progress made in the states.

The current divide over these reporting issues is so sharp that it is unlikely that the Center will immediately win over the usual skeptics. These skeptics’ complaint is that terms like “dark money” or “gray money” are highly charged but hopelessly vague, and that they are being used to justify proposed reforms that would impede the exercise of free speech rights. They are loathe to empower the government to do too much, and behind this is the conviction that government in the control of particular political interests will use disclosure to hound adversaries or subject them to public harassment.

But the skeptics might be surprised that the Brennan Center Report does not minimize the burdens and political risks of disclosure regimes. It argues for reasonable monetary thresholds, to keep the smaller contributions out of the public reports; for reasonable exemptions for especially vulnerable participants; and for "other reasonable accommodations" to allow donors to support organizations for charitable or social welfare purposes without falling within disclosure requirements that apply to the financing of political activities. In addition, the Center quite sensibly would have "[any] penalty for failure to disclose… fit the severity of the violation."

Mark Patterson observes that Donald Trump refuses to make the personal tax disclosure that is routinely and without exception expected of senior federal officials. He describes Congress’ strict enforcement of this obligation, which includes the deep probing of returns by the Senate Finance and other congressional committees that, in Patterson’s words, require “answers [to] dozens of detailed questions about sources of income, deductions, investments, tax treatment (and immigration status] of domestic employees and other topics.” Yet Trump says that in his case, it is “none of your business,” and so he is relying on the absence of any legal requirement of disclosure to deny the public what the senior officials he would appoint if President would have to provide. Patterson recommends that either the law be amended to compel presidential candidates to release this information or to provide it to congressional committees for review followed by a public assessment. (Note: Mark is one my colleagues at Perkins Coie.)

Why would presidential candidates, charged with reporting specific categories of financial information, not have to include their tax returns? The choice now is deemed to be theirs: a choice determined only by the pressures, or incentives or disincentives, of the political “marketplace”, or a personal sense of ethical obligation.

Committing this question to a purely political resolution represents a judgment that voters will set and enforce the transparency standard. They will either reward disclosure or punish candidates for resisting it, but one way or the other, voter will is what counts, and there is no need or place for a legal requirement. In fact, on this theory, it is better for the question to be referred to the voters, because they are the ones to ‘vet” the presidential candidate and to insist on what information they should have to meet their “vetting” function.

This is one view of the effects of modern political reform, and here is another, and their conclusions are, in a sense, similar: reforms have not worked as intended. But they don’t have in mind the same failures.

Robert Samuelson thinks the reforms have weakened the political system, undermining political parties and blocking other channels for constructive compromise and effective governance. Isaac Arnsdorf argues that, in the case of lobbying reform, the laws have worsened corrupt practice, not curbed it, and he is most exercised by legislators' ability to wield influence for private profit after leaving office.

The one commentator thinks we have government enfeebled by the unforeseen effects of reform; and the other sees reform to have left government more corrupt. Both analyses travel the familiar route of making a point that it invites the reader to take too far.