Larry Lessig for The Daily Beast:

Because “improper dependence” is precisely the problem that limits on aggregate contributions are meant to attack. Already we have a system in which Congress is dependent upon the tiniest fraction of the 1% to fund its campaigns. I’ve estimated the number of relevant funders is no more than 150,000 (about the number of Americans named “Lester.”) If aggregate contribution limits are struck, that number will fall dramatically. More will be raised from a smaller number of contributors—maybe as few as 40,000 (about the number of Americans named “Sheldon”). So abolishing aggregate limits will move us from Lesterland to Sheldon City, increasing a dependence on the funders, while conflicting with Madison’s promise of a branch of government “dependent on the people alone.”

That argument may or may not have worked with one of the five conservatives on the Court. There’s no such thing as a slam dunk in law, and this argument depends upon originalism applied not to the Constitution’s text, but to the standard the Court uses to interpret that text.

But the striking fact about McCutcheon is that the government didn’t even try. Originalism is not the language of liberals. It’s beneath them—the weapon of the enemy. So the government’s brief didn’t even hint at the argument that there was no good originalist reason to restrict the meaning of “corruption” to quid pro quo corruption alone. And Justice Breyer in his classically geeky dissent doesn’t even hint at the possible originalist inconsistency—even though the core of his argument is precisely that “corruption” does not mean “quid pro quo corruption” alone.