Having worried about candidate fundraising for independent committees—officials were “vexed” about this prospect, the press reported—the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board appears poised to act on that worry. A new draft it will consider next week concludes that any candidate fundraising support for an independent committee is “coordination” and blocks the committee from proceeding with unlimited expenditures for the candidate.  Minn. Campaign Fin. & Pub. Disclosure Bd., Draft Advisory Op. 437 (Feb. 11, 2013).

Is Bill Maher proposing to cross the line from press commentary into campaign activity, or is he merely innovating, as the press is  scrambling everywhere to do, and preparing for a New Wave Editorial?  As Rick Pildes suggests, this question is mooted by Citizens United, which means that HBO and Maher can count on this decision to provide him much of the space he may need for his editorial project. Prior to Citizens United, HBO would have struggled to defend this program; in the wake of the decision, the path is generally clear, depending on how Maher produces the show.

How much can a candidate do for a Super PAC without illegally “coordinating” with it? Recent proposals would answer that she has to keep her distance—no publicly (or privately) stated support and no fundraising for the independent committee. A bit of a surprise has developed in the debate. While questioning how far these restrictions can go, Rick Hasen concludes that as a matter of constitutional law, Congress may prohibit the fundraising, and on this point, he sides in theory with Brad Smith of the Center for Competitive Politics. Richard L. Hasen, Super PAC Contributions, Corruption, and the Proxy War Over Coordination, Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy (forthcoming), 16-17, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2383452 ; Bradley A. Smith, Super PACs and the Role of “Coordination” in Campaign Finance Law, 49 Willamette L. Rev. 603, 635 (2013). Rick Hasen and Brad Smith are not often found in the same jurisprudential company.  So it is interesting to consider how they may have arrived there and why, in their judgments about the regulation Buckley would allow, they appear to have erred.

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.

The American Political Science Association Task Force report on political polarization, Negotiating Agreement in Politics (2013) includes a discussion of the role of campaign spending. The co-authors of this analysis, Michael Barber and Nolan McCarty, write that the role is small. But they suggest that there is more work to be done, raising the question of whether some spur to polarization might come from the rising importance to candidates of ideologically motivated individual donors.