[EL] McCutcheon

[Tyler Culberson]

Doug,
>From Commissioners Ravel and Weintraub's statement yesterday, "In fact,
only 646 donors reached the biennial limit during the 2012 cycle."


On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 7:24 PM, Scarberry, Mark <
Mark.Scarberry at pepperdine.edu> wrote:

> Can we distinguish between two "anti-corruption" interests that could be
> seen as being addressed by the dissent in McCutcheon?
>
>
>
> The first is the interest in keeping lines of communication open between
> ordinary people and their elected representatives, so as to make
> representative government responsive to the people **between elections**.
> High levels of donations cause representatives to listen only (or mostly)
> to the rich donors, breaking the link between ordinary people and their
> representatives. The voice of the ordinary person is drowned out by the
> voice of the rich donor, because the representative will listen only (or
> mostly) to the voice of the rich donor. With a reference to Rousseau (which
> one hopes does not incorporate his concept of the "general will"), the
> dissent treats the breaking of that link as a form of corruption.
>
>
>
> The second is the interest in the formation of the views of the people;
> the formation of those views may be corrupted if too much money is spent by
> rich people to help form those views or to finance the formation of such
> views. Here we run dangerously close to the concept of the "general will,"
> a true will of the people that somehow is different from what they really
> think, because their thinking has been warped by the spending of so much
> money by the rich (perhaps creating a "false consciousness"). The spending
> of huge amounts of money by the rich in furthering their own views drowns
> out the voices of the ordinary people, as both the rich speaker and the
> ordinary speaker try to convey their views to the people and to persuade
> the people.
>
>
>
> Is it clear that the dissent only sees the first of those interests as an
> "anti-corruption" interest that justifies campaign finance regulation? (At
> first I wasn't sure, especially given the "drowning out" imagery, but a
> more careful reading leads me to this conclusion.)
>
>
>
> Is it also clear that the first interest has nothing to do with which
> person is elected, but rather with who the elected person will listen to
> once elected? Thus it has nothing to do with any desire to level the
> playing field for the election, right? Instead it has to do with the
> actions that will be taken by the person once elected, which makes it
> similar to a concern about quid pro quo corruption.
>
>
>
> My apologies if I'm asking the list to reinvent the wheel.
>
>
>
> Mark
>
>
>
> Mark S. Scarberry
>
> Professor of Law
>
> Pepperdine Univ. School of Law
>
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>
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