Political Parties\u27 Likely Response to the Constitutional Challenges to BCRA (original) (raw)

Soft Money Evolution: Transient State of Federal Campaign Finance Laws

Laws relating to Campaign Finance Reform, or how money can be raised and spent in elections, has been an issue broached by Congress multiple times over the past half century. However, each time Acts such as the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) or the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) are passed, they become essentially ineffective a few years later when the Supreme Court declares portions of the law unconstitutional. In addition to connecting the dots between these Acts of Congress and subsequent Supreme Court decisions that overturned portions of these laws, this paper relates precedent and law to the Constitutional rights afforded by the First Amendment. My paper also chronicles the evolution of soft money, which are funds exploited by Political Action Committees (PACS). After providing examples of how our nations’ federal election laws are exploited and rendered ineffective in what has become a cyclical system of campaign finance reform, I argue that there exists a zero-sum cyclical cycle of campaign finance reform as laws have been rendered essentially useless due to subsequent court decisions. The soft money evolution must be stopped. Congress needs to create a permanent solution in the form of a fully Constitutional Act that protects the freedoms of all Americans while upholding the integrity of our electoral system.

The Deep Patterns of Campaign Finance Law

Why has American campaign finance law long suffered from doctrinal confusion and sparked bitter ideological conflict? This Article demonstrates that these attributes are rooted in a judicial dispute over the cognitive and social characteristics of central actors in elections. The Article unpacks the foundations of campaign finance law through a multi-tiered analysis of case texts. It first explicates the doctrinal deficiencies that riddle the Supreme Court's campaign finance jurisprudence. These flaws reflect the Court's clumsy engagement with democratic theory, which has been an unrecognized driver of campaign finance law and the wellspring of the partisan dispute. Conservatives assert that the pillar of democracy is free participation in the marketplace of information, and subsequently reject restriction of campaign financing even when advanced in the name of anticorruption. Conversely, liberals perceive democracy as vulnerable to systemic corruption from plutocratic influences and thus endorse regulatory oversight of campaign spending. The latter half of the Article excavates the origins of this conflict: the factions adopt divergent positions on the cognitive and social attributes of political actors (voters, candidates, donors, and public officials). As these positions inform the factions' theories of democracy, the campaign finance quagmire can be traced to political and psychological assumptions present in the cases. Progress in campaign finance law demands revision of the relationship between these assumptions and contemporary electoral realities.