McCutcheon Ruling: Supreme Court Follows The Money. "One Dollar, One Vote"

THE NEW YORK TIMES: The court follows the money. "The Supreme Court on Wednesday continued its crusade to knock down all barriers to the distorting power of money on American elections. In the court's most significant campaign-finance ruling since Citizens United in 2010, five justices voted to eliminate sensible and long-established contribution limits to federal political campaigns. Listening to their reasoning, one could almost 

You just look at it and know...

BLOOMBERG VIEW: The Supreme Court's naive politics. "There are no former politicians on the current U.S. Supreme Court -- and it shows. Today's 5-4 decision striking down some limits on individual campaign contributions may be right on the law, but it's dangerously wrong on the politics." The Editors.

The GOP alternative to money in politics.

(Of course, it works even better with limitless amounts of cash.)

McCUTCHEON: I fought the law, and I won. "I have been repairing things since I was a kid. When I was in high school, I fixed many motorcycles, electronics and cars. My next-door neighbor was a man named Honest John. He was a used-car dealer in downtown Birmingham. I was low-cost help for him. And I got the work done. Since then, I have been getting things done in workshops and production operations all over the United States and around the world. Now I'm an electrical engineer, and I run a successful small business near Birmingham, Alabama. That engineer's mindset has guided my political activity, including the decision to take my First Amendment challenge to the Supreme Court." Shaun McCutcheon in Politico Magazine.

HASEN: The subtle awfulness of the McCutcheon decision. "oday, once again, the government lost a campaign finance case, McCutcheon v. FEC. And while it could have lost in somewhat worse ways, this opinion is pretty awful, portending a raft of new First Amendment attacks on soft money and even on the basic rules limiting how much individuals can give candidates for office....We have vintage Roberts playing the long game. The tone is one of minimalism and moderation: We are only striking down aggregate limits, not the base limits, which currently prevent individuals from giving more than $2,600 per election to federal candidates....But this is nevertheless a subtly awful decision. It is true that Roberts sidestepped today the question of whether to apply "strict scrutiny" of contribution limits in another case; he did not need to take that dramatic (and high-profile) step to do a whole lot of damage to campaign finance law. Instead, he did three things which now set the course toward even more campaign finance challenges under the First Amendment and more deregulation." Richard L. Hasen in Slate.

DRUTMAN: An even more unequal system of campaign finance. "It will further empower small set of elite donors who have the means and the motive to play an even more important role in the setting of agendas, positions and candidates. And it will probably benefit Republicans more than Democrats. So now what? Political operatives will, of course, come up with new ways to take advantage of a post-McCutcheon world. Whether it is through joint committees or through some proliferation of affiliated PACs, these operatives will almost certainly soon be in a position to ask a donor to write a seven figure check and then distribute that money in a way that was not possible prior to the ruling. The awkward super PAC dance of independence and non-coordination can end. This will almost certainly make parties and party leaders more important and super PACs less important." Lee Drutman in The Washington Post.

KLEINER: Roberts shows he has no idea how money in politics works. "In reality, the case may not have a huge impact on elections. By tearing down any restriction on the amount that an individual can donate to a Super PAC, Citizens United already opened the spigot on unlimited money in our electoral system. Today's decision builds on Citizens United but the harm to democracy has already been done. What is striking about the opinion is how completely off-base Chief Justice Roberts is in his understanding of the role of money in politics....Roberts says that legislation cannot seek to limit what he calls the 'general gratitude a candidate may feel toward those who support him or his allies, or the political access such support may afford.' Roberts said 'spending large sums of money' would not 'give rise to such quid pro quo corruption.' The reality is, of course, that looking for evidence of direct trades of a Congressional vote for a donation will reveal very few instances of corruption. However, as Lawrence Lessig has established, there is a broader system of 'dependence corruption' in which candidates must rely on wealthy donors in order to have access to the political system. The Roberts Court reflects a lack of understanding in how money actually operates in our political system and has adopted such a hollow understanding of corruption that they are able to view our system as free of any corrupting influence." Sam Kleiner in The New Republic.

RAUCH: Why we need more big money in politics. "To make politics more accountable and ultimately cleaner, progressives need to consider a counterintuitive proposition: the way forward is to bring more big money back inside the political system. In politics, as in war, strategic wisdom sometimes requires abandoning even the most cherished of means to achieve an essential end. Campaign finance has reached one of those moments now." Jonathan Rauch in The Daily Beast.

CASSIDY: Roberts's law: One dollar, one vote. "The Court didn't go as far as it did in the Citizens United ruling, in 2010. That travesty amounted to a do-as-you-please charter for politically motivated billionaires like Charles and David Koch, Sheldon Adelson, James Simons, and George Soros. But Wednesday's decision, once again a five-to-four ruling, represented another significant step away from the antiquated principle of 'one person, one vote' toward the more modern, and utilitarian, notion of 'one dollar, one vote'...In this case, as in Citizens United, Roberts and his cohorts relied on a twisted reading of the First Amendment that regards giving money to candidates as a form of political speech." John Cassidy in The New Yorker.