The Back Alley Archives

Second, the floodgates point depends on how you define those terms. As even the July 22 New York Times magazine reported, there’s no significant change in corporate spending this cycle. There are certainly people running Super PACs who would otherwise be supporting candidates directly, but Citizens United didn’t cause Super PACs (as I’ll explain shortly). And the rules affecting the wealthy individuals who are spending more haven’t changed at all. It’s unclear that any “floodgates” have opened or which special interests didn’t exist before.

The underlying problem, however, isn’t the under-regulation of independent spending but the attempt to manage political speech in the first place. Political money is like water: It’ll flow somewhere because what government does matters and people want to speak about their concerns. To the extent that “money in politics” is a problem, the solution is to reduce the political scope that the money can influence. Shrink government, and you’ll shrink the amount people spend trying to get a piece of the pie.


While we await that shrinkage, we do have to address the core flaw in the campaign finance regime. That original sin was committed by the Supreme Court not in Citizens United but in the 1976 case of Buckley v. Valeo. By rewriting the Watergate-era Federal Election Campaign Act to remove spending limits but not contribution caps, Buckley upset Congress’s balanced reform.


That’s why politicians spend all their time fundraising. Moreover, the regulations have pushed money away from candidates and toward advocacy groups—undermining the worthy goal of government accountability.


To the extent that ‘money in politics’ is a problem, the solution is to reduce the political scope that the money can influence.
The solution is obvious: Liberalize rather than restrict the system. Get rid of limits on individual contributions and then require disclosures for those who donate amounts big enough for the interest in preventing corruption to outweigh the potential for harassment. Then the big boys will have to put their reputations on the line, but not the average person. Let voters weigh what a donation’s source means to them, rather than allowing politicians to write rules benefiting themselves.