William G. Grigsby, Professor Emeritus of City and Regional Planning, University of Pennsylvania, has written this draft.  Here is the abstract:

The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission 130 S. Ct. 876 (2010), spawned an almost immediate outpouring of campaign donations by corporations, unions, and wealthy individuals to Presidential and Congressional.candidates. The bulk of these new contributions are made through so-called Super PACs and non-profit social welfare organizations (501(c)(4)s that run campaigns supporting particular candidates while maintaining, at least on paper, their independence from the campaigns of these candidates. Even if the large contributions unleashed by Citizens United do not lead to quid pro quo corruption or the appearance thereof (and they clearly do the latter) they have a devastating impact on America’s representative democracy by enabling a relatively few wealthy individuals and large corporations and unions to have overwhelming influence over elected officials and election outcomes, and in the process to substantially weaken the influence of the people that candidates and office holders are supposed to represent. According to one reputable study, in federal elections the candidate with the largest war chest wins 94 percent of the time. It is not simply the size of some contributions that is a problem, it is equally or more so the fact that the large donors, can vote with their dollars for candidates anywhere in the country. In so doing, they are undermining this country’s representative democracy and replacing it with a political system best characterized as governance by the wealthy few – an unvarnished plutocracy.
Most regrettably, none of the remedies which have been proposed to address this problem would do very much to solve it. They leave the Citizens United largely untouched, and they only peripherally address the federal campaign finance excesses that were already in place prior to Citizens United. If representative democracy in the United States is to be saved, five changes in current law must be made:

1. The right to make financial contributions in a federal election campaign, whether directly to a candidate or through a PAC or Super PAC or a 50l(c0(4) organization, must be restricted to eligible voters in the political jurisdiction in which the election is being held. Rephrased, the right ‘to make contributions must be co-terminus with the right to vote. Voters in a Congressional District should not have the value of their franchise diluted by donations coming from outside their District or by non-natural persons domiciled within their District. Placing boundaries on voting speech but not on contributions speech – the need for which exists only because of the prior right of citizens to exercise voting speech- makes no sense either Constitutionally or in terms of simple logic.
2. For this proscription not to violate the freedom of speech portion of the First Amendment, the Supreme Court must abandon the legal fiction that political donations are a form of speech no different from ordinary speech. Like construction loans that enable a home to be built, money is usually needed if political speech is to be heard, but it is not synonymous with that speech. To argue otherwise is a grievous error in logic.
3. Contributions that are made through the Super PAC independent-expenditure campaigns (IECs ), and 50 1( c)( 4)s by persons and entities that are ineligible to cast a ballot must also be prohibited because they are not functionally different from either direct contributions or contributions made through PACs despite their presumed independence from the campaigns of the candidates they are assisting.

4. With respect to contributions to Presidential candidates, both the primary campaigns and the general election must be treated as 51 separate campaigns because that is exactly what they are. In the primaries, the general rules and regulations vary hugely from state to state, and in the general election, the electoral college in effect makes that contest a collection of individual state elections, not a single national one.
5. In order to prevent the above restrictions from being circumvented through the mis-use of so-called issue ads, any such ad that includes the name of one of the candidates for office should be treated as electioneering and subject to the same rules as those for campaign contributions generally. Absent these reforms, we can kiss the great American experiment in representative democracy good-bye.