I have written this piece for The Atlantic. It begins:

At some point next year, the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to face a major First Amendment question: whether to overturn what remains of the 2002 McCain-Feingold Act. This measure prohibited political parties from raising “soft money”—unlimited funds that wealthy individuals, corporations, and labor unions could give to parties, thanks to a loophole in the post-Watergate campaign-finance laws. Such a ruling would allow political parties once again to take millions of additional dollars from donors who, as the Supreme Court found in 2003, use soft money to ingratiate themselves to election officials and secure access to them. How the Court rules is likely to determine whether the wealthiest donors will have an easier path to secure that access—and whether the rest of the country will suffer as a result.