At the same time, there is room for reform–some adjustment to the regulatory process–that would account for the Super PACs’ emergence and widening impact. Transparency measures can clearly identify for the public those single-candidate Super PACs operating with the candidate’s active support and involvement. Additional resources could be made available to other actors–parties and others–that are now more regulated than Super PACs and, and in part for that reason, steadily losing ground to them. The goal would not be a deregulated campaign finance system but one that is more rationally structured and coherent.
Rick Hasen worries that the “cure may be worse than the disease.” He is suspicious or concerned that this is a move to restore the soft-money days that McCain-Feingold was supposed to close out. But the proposal is not inspired by special solicitude for parties. Parties are one of a number of electorally active organizations that would benefit from an infusion of resources but there is no case for making them the only ones. Targeted regulatory relief should be available for other membership-based organizations, and even to candidates when conducting particular voter mobilization activities.
What Rick and others overlook, minimize, or dispute is the role of reinvigorated associational activity in enhancing political equality–in advancing the goal of “the quality of inputs” that Rick champions. In his very good book, Plutocrats United, Rick does not grapple with the dependence of political equality on organizing and other means of building political strength on numbers, particularly among the very population of citizens he is most concerned with: those with modest resources. As Guy-Uriel Charles has summed up the significance of association, its “main principle…is that of effective aggregation: an individual must have a reasonable opportunity to join with like-minded others for the purpose of acquiring political power.” Guy-Uriel E. Charles, Racial Identity, Electoral Structures, and the First Amendment Right of Association, 91 Cal. L. Rev. 1209, 1248-1249 (2003).
I hope to find time soon to respond to Bob’s very thoughtful post.