Is Dependence Corruption the Solution to America's Campaign Finance Problems
![handle is hein.journals/calr102 and id is 45 raw text is: Is Dependence Corruption the Solution
to America's Campaign Finance
Problems?
Bruce E. Cain*
U.S. campaign finance regulation is currently in bad shape. The
combination of congressional inaction, regulatory ineffectiveness,
and constitutional constraint perpetuates a status quo that no one
intended and many deplore. Public financing for presidential
elections is effectively dead, while Super PACs and other forms of
independent spending are on the rise. The 501(c)(4) nonprofit
disclosure rules are very leaky, allowing corporations and others to
conceal soft money contributions to Super PACs if they so choose.
The Supreme Court has effectively precluded comprehensive
campaign finance reform by its rulings, which have thrown out
independent and personal expenditure bans,' limited public finance
to opt-in schemes,2 loosened the definition of issue ads,3 and allowed
corporations to use unlimited amounts of their treasury monies to
fund independent campaigns.4 To borrow from Vladimir Lenin,
[W]hat is to be done?5
Professor Lawrence Lessig, in his Jorde Symposium Essay,
What an Originalist Would Understand Corruption to Mean,
believes the answer is to reframe the campaign finance problem as
dependence corruption using originalist logic. Is he right? I have
my doubts, as I will explain. In an effort to persuade the Court to
reconsider its very narrow construction of permissible campaign
finance reform, Professor Lessig is trying to thread the eye of a
Copyright 0 2014 California Law Review, Inc. California Law Review, Inc. (CLR) is a
California nonprofit corporation. CLR and the authors are solely responsible for the content of their
publications.
* Charles Louis Ducommun Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Stanford
University.
1. Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, 39-59 (1976).
2. Id at 108-09.
3. FEC v. Wis. Right to Life, Inc. 551 U.S. 448, 469 (2007).
4. Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310 (2010).
5. ESSENTIAL WORKS OF LENIN 5 (Henry M. Christman ed., 1966).
37](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/calr102&div=6&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Is Dependence Corruption the Solution to America's Campaign Finance Problems
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