Bruce Cain has posted this draft on SSRN (forthcoming, California Law Review).  Here is the abstract:

Lawrence Lessig has suggested that the answer to contemporary campaign finance issues is reframing it as dependence corruption problem. I examine the merits of this approach from a political science perspective, and offer an alternative way to look at the same problem. Professor Lessig’s original intent account rests on too many contestable counterfactual assumptions about what the Founders would have thought about conditions and political practices that they could not have imagined in their day. Moreover, the argument that the Constitution’s intent is direct popular sovereignty alone ignores the Electoral College and US Senate elections based on geography. Nonetheless, I suggest that a simpler alternative is to think of the problem as one of democratic distortion, and that the solution under the current constitutional constraints requires continuing efforts to open up donor participation to all voters, fixing the broken disclosure system and preserving the current system of congestion pricing.

This is a must-read from Bruce, responding to Larry’s Jorde lecture. I particularly like Bruce’s take on Larry’s originalist argument for the “dependence corruption” rationale. (For those not following earlier, continues a conversation on “dependence corruption” and political equality begun with my Harvard Law Review book review of Larry’s book, Republic, Lost, followed by Larry’s reply at the Harvard Law Review Forum, and continued with my Response to be published in the Election Law Journal.)