Anti-abortion protesters stand outside the U.S. Supreme Court. (Astrid Riecken/The Washington Times/ZUMApress)

By any objective measure, conservative social interest groups haven’t been big spenders in the recent midterm election cycle. Compared to groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which plans to spend $75 million dollars, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which brags it will spend even more, anti-abortion groups like the National Right to Life Committee and the Susan B. Anthony List (around $1.5 million each) and the anti-gay marriage group National Organization for Marriage (under $500,000) are relatively small players in the midterm money game.

[Congress1] Yet despite their limited stake, no special interests can be said to have played a greater role in attacking and dismantling campaign finance laws at both the national and state levels than groups like the NRLC and NOM. Frequently represented by conservative attorney Jim Bopp, who also guided the Citizens United campaign finance case to the Supreme Court, groups advocating against abortion and gay marriage have waged a low-grade war on laws restricting their ability to spend money freely in elections since the early 1980s, and their victory in the recent Citizens United ruling has hardly caused them to rest on their laurels.

Bopp indicated his work was far from over after Citizens United, telling The New York Times, “Groups have to be relieved of reporting their donors if lifting the prohibition on their political speech is going to have any meaning.” As the Campaign Legal Center recently documented, these groups are engaged in multiple ongoing efforts in state and federal courts to build upon Citizens United by attacking broad areas of campaign finance law, including “contribution limits, public finance programs, the remaining limitations on corporate and union political activity and most accompanying disclosure requirements.”

“What we’re seeing is the triumph of plaintiffs who’ve discovered the word processing machine,” said Susan Lerner, executive director at the liberal citizen lobby group Common Cause New York, commenting on a spate of recent lawsuits filed by NOM in a number of states (including New York) against laws that demand donor disclosure from groups spending in state elections. “We’ve seen virtually identical lawsuits filed in different states except that the name and number of the statute being challenged is different.”

But if Citizens United served to free every interest group under the sun to spend increased cash advocating for candidates, why is it the social interest groups that have been so aggressive — and so successful — over the decades in bringing about that change? A look back at the long history of claims made by anti-abortion groups (and more recently, anti-gay marriage groups) against campaign finance laws reveals the groups have been aided by their ability to present themselves in court as a more sympathetic plaintiff than, say, the big business lobby. Driven by ideological rather than material interests, they were able to win major victories against campaign finance laws that have, intentionally or not, created opportunities for unlimited spending by some of the largest corporate interests in America.

*****

In the beginning, it looked like Jim Bopp, who set up and maintains a law practice in Terre Haute, Ind., was alone on a fairly quixotic quest. Watergate had come and gone, and the newly amended campaign finance laws restricting contributions and other forms of political activity enjoyed strong support. But groups like NRLC, for which Bopp began serving as general counsel in 1978, chafed under the new restrictions, and it wasn’t long before they got their chance to challenge them.

“Right-to-life groups have done a lot of litigating, but of course the campaign finance laws were directed at them,” said Bopp. “One of the first cases I brought was for a right-to-life group against FEC regulations that would have outlawed voter guides. And right-to-life voter guides were given the credit — or blame, depending on how you see it — for 12 senators being defeated and Reagan being elected and all that. So these groups felt under attack and they fought, and they were very successful at getting that job done.”

Bopp’s claim that groups like NRLC felt singled out by campaign finance laws isn’t without merit. “He tends to work with the so called ‘right-to-life’ and ‘defense of marriage’ groups, and one of the reasons is that issue-specific groups — particularly those that focus on wedge issues — are some of the most harmed by laws restricting their lobbying and political activity,” said John Pomeranz, an attorney at Harmon, Curran, Spielberg and Eisenberg LLP and an expert on the law governing election-related activity by tax-exempt organizations. “That’s because the candidates, at least in the general election, don’t like to take positions out on the extreme on either side, … [and] outside groups, in order to get the message they want out in front of the electorate, need to do so themselves.”

If such groups initially felt cast out of the mainstream, however, they soon caught the attention of a resurgent segment of the Republican Party that advocated a broader agenda of deregulation in all areas, including campaign finance.

“There’s an affinity between conservative Republicans and campaign finance deregulation, which has led to a lot of funding for people like Jim Bopp who already have an ideological agenda,” said Rick Hasen, an elections law professor at Loyola Law School. Indeed, one of Bopp’s greatest sources of funding emerged when Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) embraced Bopp and his cause of campaign finance deregulation and helped him set up his own nonprofit litigation center — the James Madison Center for Free Speech — in 1996, on which McConnell agreed to serve as the honorary chairman.

Bopp, for his part, considers himself a advocate first and foremost for the First Amendment, and he argued that any groups, liberal or conservative, looking to restrict free speech will one day live to regret it. “It really does ebb and flow,” he said, “and that’s why people are really mistaken if they think their views on this or that are not under attack now so they can get a partisan advantage by proposing regulations, like Democrats supporting McCain-Feingold to get some advantage and never thinking they’re going to be looking down the barrel of a gun soon enough.”

“I’ve always thought the First Amendment was for everybody,” he added.

Groups like Common Cause, however, which often find themselves arguing against Bopp’s campaign finance challenges in the courts, have a different label for the relationship his clients have formed with Republicans like McConnell.

“It’s an unholy marriage between some politically extreme elements and a very well-financed corporatist push,” said Lerner. Lerner’s group noted in a report, released this week, that when the James Madison Center opened, conservative donors and foundations flocked to the cause. And the Republican National Committee itself began frequently procuring legal services from Bopp, paying his firm approximately $1.5 million in legal fees since 2003.

But while the right-to-life groups’ interests might have become wedded to other conservative causes, they felt comparatively much freer to advocate for campaign finance deregulation than their corporate cousins.

“The large commercial interests know that their position is not popular, and they don’t want to be seen as the forces that break the campaign finance laws,” said Lerner. The anti-abortion groups, on the other hand, feel no such compunction.

When it comes to bringing cases against campaign finance laws, “everybody has their own calculus,” said Pomeranz, “and the factors are, how essential to my ideology is it that this message gets said, how likely is it that someone else is going to say this message, how much resources do I have and what are the downsides?” Compared to a commercial interest like Target, which faced the prospect of an economic boycott earlier this year when its donation to a controversial candidate in Minnesota was revealed, social interests have little to lose.

“I don’t think that a group that as its usual method of operation hangs outside abortion clinics with pictures of fetuses is particularly worried about its image to the greater public,” said Pomeranz.

The campaign finance reform community might revile them for their efforts, but right-to-life groups also cut a sympathetic figure in the courts. “When presenting challenges to campaign finance, ideological groups represent a more appealing kind of plaintiff than a General Motors kind of plaintiff,” said Hasen. As far back as 1986, when the courts decided Federal Election Commission v. Massachusetts Citizens for Life in favor of the abortion rights group and its desire to spend funds from its general treasury, the nature of social interest groups’ cause has played to their advantage.

“Massachusetts Citizens made a distinction between ideological nonprofit corporations and other corporations,” added Hasen. “If you were ideological and [weren’t about making] money, then you were not subject to the rules limiting the spending of general treasury funds on political activities.”

“Voluntary political associations do not suddenly present the specter of corruption merely by assuming the corporate form,” the court ruled at the time. It was a small foothold along the way to future cases won by Bopp in the following decades, which would strike down a different set of prohibitions — many instituted by the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform legislation in 2002 — on corporate political spending.

By the time the 2008 elections rolled around, Bopp felt the courts were finally prepared to overturn regulations on corporate election spending more broadly, and he advised the conservative (though not social issues oriented) group Citizens United on how to serve as a deliberate test of campaign finance limits. “The reason they didn’t fit under the Massachusetts Citizens for Life exemption is that they took a little bit of corporate money just to lose the exemption and challenge the law,” said Hasen.

When the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United, conservative social interest groups like the Family Research Council rejoiced, hailing the decision as “a win for free political speech and the right of corporate citizens to join the political process.” Tim Goeglein, vice president of Focus on the Family Action, agreed, arguing that for “organizations like Focus on the Family Action, the family policy councils, all of our allies … this will give us an incredible voice in the great issues of our time.”

The irony of the victory is that it was won by “a small ideological group,” said Hasen, “yet the beneficiary is every corporation and labor union in America.”

The Republican National Committee, headed by Chairman Michael Steele, is losing influence as interest groups increase their independent spending. (Flickr: pamhule)

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, many groups, from independent political action committees to the Republican National Committee, decided to test the waters and file cases against the Federal Elections Commission arguing that they, too, should enjoy the ability to solicit unlimited donations for spending on specific, non-coordinated campaign activities. In the case of the RNC, the group sought to reverse the longstanding “soft money” ban in McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation that prevented the parties from raising unlimited sums of money for “party building” and other activities not directly related to elections. While the challenge failed, the three-judge panel that ruled against the RNC did express worry about the implications of a growing divide between the fundraising capacities of outside groups and the traditional party committees.

[Economy1] “Under current law,” the panel wrote in a footnote to its opinion, “outside groups — unlike candidates and political parties — may receive unlimited donations both to advocate in favor of federal candidates and to sponsor issue ads. We recognize the RNC’s concern about this disparity, which, it argues, discriminates against the national political parties in political and legislative debates. But that is an argument for the Supreme Court or Congress.”

In the absence of any such intervention in Congress, however, that potential disparity is looking increasingly like a reality. After countless election cycles in which the traditional party committees — the RNC, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and their Democratic counterparts — dominated the landscape of independent expenditures on behalf of candidates, they are being substantially outgunned this time around by a nexus of outside spending outfits that represent a variety of special interests. According to data compiled in mid-October, 59 percent of all independent expenditures are coming from non-party-aligned groups — a substantial reversal from the previous midterm election cycle in 2006, when party committees accounted for 82 percent of all spending on such ads.

This election cycle, the bulk of independent expenditures — particularly among conservative groups — have in many ways mimicked the former role of the now-enfeebled RNC. As of Oct. 20, conservative outside groups have combined to spend over $99 million on ads to support Republicans and attack Democrats, more than twice as much as the NRSC and the NRCC. And the biggest conservative non-party players — like American Crossroads, Crossroads GPS, the 60-Plus Association, and Americans for Job Security — are linked both to each other and the Bush-era GOP by operatives such as Bush advisers Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie, who informally advise and raise funds for the groups.

Election experts and campaign lawyers argue that the changed landscape has broad implications for the future of how elections are fought and won. Fueled by the anonymity afforded by the tax status of many outside groups on one side and the laws enforcing tight fundraising limits for the parties on the other, the shift in the landscape threatens to weaken the party committees’ ability to enforce discipline over the messaging it would like to adopt and the candidates it might want to run in different races around the country. Meanwhile, the shadowy and transient nature of many new groups entering the scene has the potential to usher in a decidedly more reckless era of campaign spending, in which outside spending entities that lack the accountability and reputational considerations of the national parties continue to seize a more prominent role in the national discourse.

*****

When the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law passed in 2002, it drew praise from reform groups as a way to limit the influence of money in elections. Now, however, many admit that after lax enforcement by regulatory agencies and court rulings like Citizens United, McCain-Feingold ultimately just caused that money to migrate to groups outside the umbrella of the traditional parties. Following the law’s passage, new independent groups began exploiting various sections of the tax code in earnest to serve as an outlet for the soft-money political contributions that previously made their way to the national party coffers.

“The soft money ban, no question,” said Caleb Burns, a partner at Wiley Rein, a law firm that specializes in election law, in response to a question about the cause of the declining influence of the party committees. “You can point right to that and the congressional testimony where the rise of independent third-party groups was predicted on the floor of the U.S. Congress.” Some groups opposed the bill’s basic principle of limiting any form of campaign spending, but to others, said Burns, “it was a policy objection among people who feared we’re going to legislate away the power of political parties. I don’t have a judgment as to whether the RNC is any less powerful in relation to American Crossroads or whomever, but by hamstringing the parties in terms of the money they can raise for similar activity, that can’t not be detrimental.”

The party committees aren’t in danger of disappearing anytime soon — the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, NRSC and NRCC are all still among the top ten groups makings independent expenditures — but experts note that their decline in relative importance in funding races could affect the bridging role they often play in crafting a common message among different interest groups in the parties.

“In coming up with a platform, in our country the parties tend to be umbrella groups that prevent splintering among allies, like social and fiscal conservatives in the Republican Party, or labor unions and ethnic minorities in the Democratic Party,” said Loyola Law School professor Rick Hasen, an elections law expert. “If parties were weaker, I think that you could potentially see some shift in the two-party system, but I don’t think it would ever come to that because the people who control the rules are also a part of the parties.”

But even if the two-party system remains intact, there is evidence that the new campaign finance landscape has already come to the aid of outside candidates who were, at times, opposed by party leadership. “I think you’re seeing a perfect example on the right with the rise of the Tea Party,” said Burns.

Indeed, in many low-turnout primaries across the country, outside spending groups like the Club for Growth and the Tea Party Express were able to leverage conservative anger into upset primary victories for hyper-conservative candidates through large, last-minute infusions of cash in states like Kentucky, Alaska and Delaware. And while the Republican Party has temporarily put its internecine conflicts on hold in an effort to win majorities in Congress, the party’s divisions following the election could quickly be magnified once again by the outside spending outfits that have risen to support the different factions.

“Republicans don’t really have that consensus on where to go and who’s in charge right now,” said Paul Blumenthal, who studies political spending at the Sunlight Foundation, which advocates for greater transparency in government. “Where do they line up in the Republican [presidential] primary? How do they go after each other? That’s the next story.”

And while most outside spending efforts in the current general election cycle are informally acknowledged as a sort of auxiliary wing of the Republican and Democratic parties, there’s no guarantee that this will remain the case in elections to come.

“What we’ve seen up till now is the Republican leadership in exile control the party and decide who can get elected and who can’t, but it’s conceivable another group of people or corporations not in Republican leadership could do the same thing,” said Blumenthal. “While we haven’t directly seen that in many cases, there have been some groups, like [Alaskans Standing Together] running ads for Lisa Murkowski, that are made up entirely of corporations. This is just the first instance where such a landscape exists and I’m sure it will continue to surprise us.”

*****

As to whether this infusion of outside cash at the expense of the parties’ ability to enforce discipline represents a positive or negative trend for policy debates — and democratic discourse in general — it’s simply too soon to tell. On one level, said Burns, “as much as one might disagree with a group’s message, you’re increasing the amount of public debate and bringing in more voices, and that’s always a net positive.”

Yet non-party actors tend to bring an element of recklessness to political contests as well. “Outside groups tend to be more negative because there’s less reputational costs for doing so,” said Hasen. “If the Republican Party runs an ad that’s really negative, it could hurt the party brand, but a group like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is gone by the next election cycle.”

Analyses of the nature of ads during the current election cycle by the Wesleyan Media Project bear these predictions out, at least in part. While the overall percentage of negative ads isn’t up significantly over the 2008 cycle, the Project concludes that “one effect of increased interest group activity is that outside groups are increasingly becoming the source of negativity.”

One in every three attack ads in Senate races, according to the study, is brought by an interest group — a rate that’s up about 7 percentage points from 2008. A growing division of campaign labor has emerged, in other words, in which candidates in many races — most notably Republican Senate candidate Ken Buck in Colorado — pledge to run clean campaigns while relying on outside spending outfits to perform their dirty work for them.

“Campaign financing tends to be dynamic,” said Hasen. “After every election cycle there’s often a response.” But if recent trends continue and Congress doesn’t act, it’s possible the traditional party committees could eventually find themselves in an unfamiliar place — just one special interest group among many.

“I can’t change where we’ve been yesterday,” Coleman said, “but we can say starting from now that we reach agreement on this and that simply now we look forward and by looking forward ensure that only Minnesotans and only companies headquartered in Minnesota and individuals in Minnesota, that they’re the ones who decide who the next senator should be.”

Next election, locked in a tight battle in 2008 with current Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), he suddenly took down all his negative advertising and called on his opponent and all outside campaign committees to do the same. “At times like this, politics should not add to the negativity. It should lift people up with hope and a confident vision for the future,” he told the Star-Tribune.

Since helping found the American Action Network, however, Coleman’s been sounding a different tune. While the group was intended to serve largely as a policy shop to rival the liberal Center for American Progress, it has mainly just been cutting ads attacking Democrats (including Feingold) who are currently engaged in tight races.

In addition to infusing hundreds of thousands of dollars in outside cash into Feingold’s Wisconsin race, Coleman’s group has also spent $750,000 targeting Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) in her tight contest against Republican Dino Rossi and $450,000 attacking Senate candidate Rep. Paul Hodes (D) in New Hampshire. And because it is incorporated as a 501(c)4 “social welfare” nonprofit, the D.C.-based AAN does not publicly disclose its donors and has not listed any contributors on the independent expenditure forms it is obliged to file with the FEC.

From an outsider’s perspective it’s clear. Instead of having single touch point within the Administration we will now be working with one person who already has more than a full-time job, and an academic with no government experience. Sorry, but this doesn’t add up to a strong continuing commitment by the Administration to these issues. This concern is magnified manifold when Eisen’s key successor – Bauer — can hardly be described as having the DNA of a ‘reformer.’  This is the man who invented the rationale for the acceptance of “soft money’’ – unregulated (chiefly corporate) funds that flooded elections to the tune of $1.5 billion between 1992 and 2002, and the man who sided with arch conservatives in their defense of lack of transparency.

Some of the aforementioned seem like good reasons, like the fact that Bauer’s double duties will mean that his attention will be divided, at best, when he takes on transparency issues at the White House. The attacks against Bauer’s commitment to reform are only somewhat convincing, however.

As evidence, Miller appears to cite Bauer’s book, More Soft Money Hard Law, which detailed the intricacies of campaign finance law following McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform legislation in 2002, and the fact that Bauer provided legal advice to Democrat-friendly 527 groups during the 2004 elections — though she only links to a list of “soft money” totals between 1992 and 2002. Neither of these facts, taken on their own, seem to indicate that Bauer is anything other than an expert on the subject of campaign finance.

Yet Miller also highlights a blog item written by Bauer in which he points out an argument, made by others, that the act of disclosure is not always without cost. Citing the controversy over the harassment of donors to Prop 8 in California, he writes:

Disclosure as a regulatory tool in political finance will not soon come under extensive re-consideration.  Its virtues are largely unquestioned, except in the rare case where identifiable minority interests are plainly, foreseeably at risk. But it is useful to reflect from time to time on the facile acceptance of disclosure without any sensitivity to the costs for those whose political preferences, expressed perhaps with only a handful of dollars, are exposed to the wired world, along with precise information about where they live or work.  “Downsides”, for sure.

The blog post points out a point of view rather than encapsulate Bauer’s opinion on the subject as whole, yet it does reflect the general nature of his posts: namely, that improving disclosure is not a cut and dry issue moral issue without downsides. This is a contrarian point of view and would certainly rile those in the transparency community. It also merits further investigation into Bauer’s stance on the issue as a whole.

Ken Hechler, a former congressman and former state Secretary of State — ironically, Manchin succeeded him in that role — filed the necessary paperwork today to run in the Aug. 28 Democratic primary. As of this article’s posting, he and Manchin are the only filed candidates.

Hechler started his political career as a White House assistant during the Truman administration. As a member of Congress, he represented portions of what is now Rep. Nick Rahall’s (D) district between 1959 and 1977. After losing the 1976 Democratic gubernatorial primary to now-Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D) and a bid to win back his old House seat in 1978, Hechler went on to serve as Secretary of State from 1985 through 2001. By the time of the Nov. 2 special election, Hechler will be 96 years old — four years older than Byrd was when he died June 28.

Hechler is far more liberal than Manchin. He was a strong advocate of campaign finance reform, joining activist Doris “Granny D” Haddock in her lobbying efforts that eventually produced the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. He is also an outspoken advocate of mining safety reforms. He was critical of the Mining Safety and Health Administration in the wake of the April explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine during an interview with TWI later that month.

“This is a case not only of the operator thumbing his nose at the strictly legal requirements and regulations,” Ken Hechler, former West Virginia congressman who was lead sponsor of a 1969 law that overhauled mining safety, said this week in a phone interview. “It also involves a failure of the Mine Safety and Health Administration itself to act aggressively against the mine in order to ensure that either the conditions be made safe, as provided in the law, or to toughen the enforcement … to close the mine.”

In fact, Hechler appears to be basing his entire campaign on another mining issue — mountaintop removal. He told the Charleston Daily Mail:

“I don’t want to make it a campaign against Gov. Manchin,” Hechler said this morning, speaking on the phone from New York, where he is doing a series of public lectures. “I want to make it about mountaintop removal. A vote for me is not a vote for Ken Hechler –  it’s tantamount to a vote against mountaintop removal.”

Manchin has generally been an opponent of mining reforms — recently because he has considered suing the Environmental Protection Agency over new water quality guidelines that would affect work at the state’s strip mines. Manchin has received $281,963 in campaign contributions from coal industry PACs and individuals who work in the industry.

Hechler’s candidacy does not appear to pose a significant challenge to Manchin’s claim on the Democratic nomination — Hechler told the Daily Mail as much. But given that the two represent two different political ideologies present within the state party, things could still get interesting.

Today, however, Brown told the groups they shouldn’t count on his support:

No matter how one feels about McCain-Feingold, at least that was an honest attempt to reform campaign finance laws that would not have gone into effect until after the next election cycle. The DISCLOSE Act does the opposite – it changes the rules in the middle of the game to provide a tactical advantage to the majority party.

Brown goes on to argue that the bill provides special treatment to labor unions and some large nonprofits, despite their political nature. He is right to point out that the DISCLOSE Act was subject to some shady carve-outs, most notably at the hands of the National Rifle Association, in order to pass the House.

His claim that because it “changes the rules in the middle of the game,” DISCLOSE is a partisan bill designed to provide a tactical advantage to Democrats seems less persuasive. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling also changed the rules of the game in this election cycle, and the DISCLOSE Act was designed to counteract some of the outsize influence that third-party advocacy groups now plan to wield in the run-up to November.

The highlights:

• Ban on expenditures from foreign interests.
• Ban on expenditures from Federal contractors.
• Ban on expenditures from TARP recipients.
• Disclosure to the public through enhanced reporting through the FEC and LDA.
• Disclosure to shareholders directly and through the SEC.
• Stand By Your Ad (CEO and donor disclosure).
• Lowest Unit Rate (air time for candidates and party committees).
• Coordination Rules (tightened between outside groups and candidates).

Not that this has much chance to get anywhere anytime soon — especially considering the way Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) embraced the Citizens United decision. But it’s probably also more realistic for Congress to address the issue this way, rather than going the much tougher Constitutional-amendment route.

“The ruling reached by the Roberts’ Court [sic] overturned decades of legal precedent by allowing corporations unfettered spending in our political campaigns,” Edwards said in a statement. “Another law will not rectify this disastrous decision.  A Constitutional Amendment is necessary to undo what this Court has done.”

It’s not only House leaders eyeing that option. Testifying before the Senate Rules Committee this morning, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) also promoted that idea.

“We need a constitutional amendment to make it clear once and for all that corporations do not have the same free speech rights as individuals,” Kerry said.

For campaign finance reform supporters, it’s exactly the right move.

“The court’s overreach is so shocking, and the certain consequences so damaging, that we must have a constitutional corrective,” Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, said in a statement. ”The First Amendment was never intended to protect the likes of ExxonMobil, Pfizer or Goldman Sachs, nor should it.”

Today, Yale law professors Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres offer a solution. Writing in The Washington Post, the campaign finance reformers propose a new statute to keep the financing restrictions in place for any companies doing business with the federal government (i.e., most of the country’s biggest corporations). Using the drug lobby as an illustration, they explain:

Federal contractors already are not allowed to “directly or indirectly . . . make any contribution of money or other things of value” to “any political party, committee, or candidate.” This provision arguably bars Big Pharma from launching a media campaign in favor of a candidate who supports its special deals, thereby “indirectly providing” the candidate something “of value.” But it doesn’t cover the case in which contractors threaten to spend millions to oppose senators and representatives who refuse their excessive demands.

There is a need, then, for a new statutory initiative: The same anti-corruption rationale may prohibit contractors from spending millions in favor of candidates requires a statutory prohibition on a negative advertising blitz.

It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine, for example, the drug industry going after Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who’s been pushing a proposal to empower states to negotiate pharmaceutical prices for their lowest-income seniors. (The prohibition on those negotiations has been a cash cow for the drug companies.)

Ackerman and Ayres predict that their proposal would withstand the scrutiny of even the conservative-leaning Supreme Court.

The Roberts court is skeptical — to put it mildly — of campaign finance restrictions. But it is still highly unlikely that the justices would strike down a law targeting federal contractors. All nine recognize that Congress may restrict free speech when there is a significant risk of corruption. That risk is obvious when corporate speakers are simultaneously doing business with the government.

Of course, with just 10 months to go before November’s midterms, Congress would have to act quickly — not something it’s exactly known for.

Today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing Citizens United to air its documentary films and advertisements is a tremendous victory, not only for Citizens United but for every American who desires to participate in the political process.

As our case amply demonstrates, campaign finance legislation over the last two decades has imposed, as Justice Kennedy put it, a “censorship . . . vast in its reach.” By overruling Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and striking down McCain-Feingold’s ban on so-called electioneering communications, the Supreme Court has made possible the participation in our political process that is the right of every American citizen – a right that had been severely curtailed under McCain-Feingold.

This is a victory for Citizens United, but even more so for the First Amendment rights of all Americans. The fault line on this issue does not split liberals and conservatives or Republicans and Democrats. Instead, it pits entrenched establishment politicians against the very people whom they are elected to serve.

And Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.):

I am disappointed by the decision of the Supreme Court and the lifting of the limits on corporate and union contributions.  However, it appears that key aspects of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), including the ban on soft money contributions, remain intact.

That’s the entire McCain statement.