Check out David M. Mason’s recent piece in Engage, the journal of the Federalist Society’s practice groups. Mason’s article, “No Cure for Corruption: Public Financing under Constitutional Constraints,” appeared in the Free Speech and Election Law section.
Mason is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former Chairman of the Federal Election Commission.
Here’s an excerpt:
Trends in technology and constitutional interpretation are likely to continue, however, to make public financing—at least that associated with spending limits—unattractive. Low-cost, high-volume Internet fundraising has overwhelmed spending limits associated with traditional public financing schemes. At the same time, courts have clarified that public funding schemes may not coerce or handicap privately-funded candidates, for instance by giving advantages to publicly-funded candidates on account of an opponent’s private fundraising. Further, courts have increasingly limited the rationales sufficient to justify limits on private political financing, and therefore expanded the scope and volume of private financing. The Supreme Court’s recent order for rehearing in Citizens United v. FEC gives a strong hint that the Court will extend this trend. Reform proposals have finally adapted with increasing subsidies and by increasing or eliminating spending limits.
In an era of broad-based Internet fundraising, public financing begins to look like a cure in search of a disease. Even worse, the super-subsidies required to compete with Internet-enabled fundraising offer powerful inducements to the fraud and corruption that campaign finance laws are purportedly intended to prevent. A campaign finance scheme enabling corruption is not a cure worse than the disease: it is a contagion masquerading as a cure.
