The New York Times this morning reports on political spending in this election cycle, but it also wishes to explain to readers the meaning of all these dollars. So the article this morning about the money going into Senate and House races links the cash to “consequences [that] are already becoming apparent”: candidate loss of control over their messaging and a sharply negative tone. The grounds for these conclusions are not drawn from the the numbers.  They are added on.

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.

Here are three recent lines of argument about campaign finance, two of them in response to McCutcheon and one of them about the escalating conflict between the FEC Commissioners.  Each is interesting in its own way; they are also constituent parts of the basic, most frequently heard defense of the Watergate-era regulatory program.

The most recent issue of Election Law Journal offers interesting writing on lobbying. One of the articles, Money, Priorities and Stalemate: How Lobbying Affects Public Policy, is a study by Professor Frank R. Baumgartner and several colleagues who show that there is an unimpressive relationship between the resources devoted to lobbying and particular outcomes that the lobbyists had hoped to bring about. The authors do not suggest that the money put behind lobbying has no effect, only that we should understand better the nature of the effect and its limits. A number of factors, they argue, are relevant to the measurement of lobbying success, including the capacity of lobbyists to hold the attention of lawmakers who must choose among a broad range of issues in allocating their time. The co-authors of this study also stress that many of the advantages possessed by well-established interests are already "baked in" to public policy, and therein lies a major advantage: that it is much harder to change a policy than to establish one.

In the discussion of Super PACs,  seemingly different concerns tend to intermingle or become fused together, creating confusion.  Most obvious is the continuing disagreement about whether candidate support for an independent committee, particularly fundraising, results in “coordination.”  Some argue—some propose an amendment to the law to provide—that a candidate’s public endorsement of a committee, including but not limited to appeals for funds, is coordination.  Another view distinguishes among Super PACs and would subject single-candidate committees to stricter coordination than others.