If I’ve read this correctly, Brad Smith argues in the WSJ that Congress has no power to regulate campaigns, as opposed to regulating elections themselves:

But the problem goes deeper than the need to define “corruption” and balance it against the “urgency” of political speech. There is no constitutional basis for government to regulate political speech through campaign-finance laws.

When Congress passed the Federal Election Campaign Act in 1971, it claimed authority under its constitutional power to regulate the “time, place and manner” of elections. The Supreme Court accepted this premise without analysis in Buckley v. Valeo (1976). But political campaigns aren’t “elections,” and campaign-finance laws obviously don’t regulate the time and place of an election. But neither do they regulate the manner of holding an election. Dating may precede marriage, but it isn’t marriage. Similarly, campaigns precede elections, but those campaigns aren’t elections. They are speech: Americans are debating and talking about the candidates.

Elections are the casting and counting of votes. To run an election, the government must choose the date and polling places, manage voter registration, tally ballots and so on. Administering an election is far different from regulating a political campaign—a candidate or party’s conversations with voters. Campaigns consist of speech, publishing and assembly, three fundamental rights enshrined in the First Amendment….

It is time to recognize that the government has no business regulating political and campaign speech at all. Just as the religion clauses of the First Amendment have been understood to separate church and state, the amendment also requires a separation of campaigns and state. The justices should prevent those in power from regulating debate about whether they should remain in power.