[EL] Citizens-U, prospectively

[Roy Schotland]

Interesting exchanges were here recently about media treatment of CU, which some would say over-demonized it, bad as the opinion is.  
     Today, only a few sentences at the end below about what's behind us-- but first about Disclosure.
 
The pending new "DISCLOSE" bill, now free of the fatal flaws in the version tried when the House was Democratic, faces a tough turf in Congress.  But aren't the odds for fine state statutes favorable in at least a notable number of significant States?  Most State law is obsolete, requiring disclosure only for funds sponsoring Magic Words ads.  When I ask "What State has an effective statute?", I'm sent to ones that turn out to be limited to Magic Words or are otherwise ineffective.  So far as I've been able to find, Maryland adopted the best recent statute-- but it was amended right after enactment, restoring the Magic Words requirement.
     Of course state law can't do what the Feds can do, but disclosure in several significant States would be huge on its own and have powerful ripples.  
     Question 1:  which State(s) if any has a statute that requires disclosure of fudning sources for independent spending?  At very least for all broadcast but hopefully also mass mailings, robocalls, etrc.  ...?
     Question 2:  in which if any States are efforts pending to get such a statute?
 
Last, to look back briefly at the "reception" of Citizens-U:  It hasn't been only the media that, to use Justin Levitt's perfect words, were  "disproportionately 

rabid[,] . . . over-overwrought."  No less a scholar than Ronald Dworkin wrote of  The Decision That Threatens Democracy (ignoring that half our 50 States allowed corporate spending --were those States not democracies?). 

      Adam Liptak, almost immediately after CU came down, wrote in the Columbia Law School Magazine, quoting several Columbia profs, that "the central holding ... was neither as revolutionary nor as consequential as some critics claimed....  The floodgates ... [had been] already open."  Later Rick Hasen put it so well:  "[CU] makes 'the ask' so much easier."  (For excerpts, see 20 Corn.J.L.&P.P. 753.)

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