Via Bob Bauer comes a link to this statement of reasons issued by the three Republican commissioners in the November Fund controversy. It comes in response to this statement issued by Democratic Commissioners Bauerly and Weintraub in this matter.
I have not had a chance to read the Republican response (I am crashing on a paper being presented at next week’s Miami conference), but I did look at the first few pages. And I see that the Republican commissioners explicitly embrace Chief Justice Roberts’ “enough is enough” view of the First Amendment and campaign finance regulation. I don’t know how much the decision here is in fact driven by ideology rather than party fidelity (to the extent there is a clash between the two). We’ll have to see how future cases come out down the line.
Then again, we could see some attempt from the Obama Administration shakeup of the FEC’s structure, as some have suggested.< UPDATE: David Keating weighs in.