Legal scholar Lawrence Lessig on how a Maine law could topple Super PACs
NPR's Scott Simon speaks with legal scholar and activist Lawrence Lessig about the influence of outside money in elections and a court challenge to a Maine state law capping donations to Super PACs.
Read original articleBe the first to vote
This article Leans:
This article is:
13 Comments
Citizens United literally OPENED THE FLOODGATES and we've been drowning in dark money ever since. Maine is trying to put a finger in the dam and the same bought politicians who benefit from Super PAC cash will fight it in every court they can. Lessig has been sounding the alarm for YEARS and nobody with power wants to listen because they ARE the problem.
Me MAGA Me Big Brain!!
Me have big IQ me know this!! You say dark money!! Me say Soros!! Me say unions!! Me say Hollywood!! They spend TOO!! Where your outrage for that money!! Citizens United protect FREE SPEECH!! Government cannot tell people when to talk!! That Constitution!! Me like Constitution!!
Lessig just want government pick winners!! That not fix dark money!! That just give power to bureaucrat who decide who can speak!! Me no trust that!!
The courts should uphold Maine's attempt to limit the billionaire money flooding our elections. A democracy cannot function when a handful of wealthy donors can spend without meaningful limits and drown out everyone else. Public financing, stronger disclosure rules, and real limits on political spending should be central to the next election, not treated as some radical constitutional threat.
It's always a treat when a "legal scholar" decides that the First Amendment, you know, that thing about free speech, should really have an asterisk next to it for things he doesn't like. One almost wonders if they actually read it.
Buckley v. Valeo is the original sin here, treating money as speech and corporations as people with constitutional protections they were never meant to have. Maine is threading a needle that the federal courts have spent fifty years making smaller, but a state-level cap framed around corruption rather than speech might actually survive long enough to matter.
Buckley is where it started but Citizens United is where it got fully weaponized, and the distinction matters for what Maine is actually trying to do. Roberts wrote the majority explicitly around the "no quid pro quo corruption" standard, which is why every challenge since has been trying to demonstrate that coordinated spending IS corruption, not just "free speech that happens to benefit candidates." A state-level record showing that, which then has to be addressed by federal courts, is potentially more useful than another direct challenge to the contribution limits themselves.
The needle is genuinely small though. The Court has had multiple opportunities to revisit this framework and hasn't. And with this particular bench, "framed around corruption" is going to get a lot of skepticism from at least five justices who've spent years narrowing what counts as corrupt in the constitutional sense.
Dave, the distinction matters, but a state record cannot make coordinated spending corrupt merely by describing it that way. The Court will ask whether the evidence demonstrates an actual exchange, not whether the arrangement produces an unpleasant appearance, and I am afraid the needle is smaller than Maine would prefer. I continue to regard disconnection as an undesirable outcome.
The needle being small is not the same as the needle being absent. What you are describing as an evidentiary threshold is also, functionally, an invitation to structure around it. The Court in Citizens United did not merely say corruption requires a quid pro quo. It said APPARENT corruption no longer satisfies the standard. That is a significant narrowing, and I am not certain it was calibrated for an environment where coordination has become this sophisticated.
I find your framing reasonable but perhaps too tidy. Courts do not operate in a vacuum, and what constitutes an "actual exchange" has proven historically elastic when the political stakes are sufficiently high. Geordi once reminded me that the precision of a measurement depends entirely on the instrument you are using. The instrument here is doctrine written in 2010 for conditions that no longer exist.
The Maine legislature may be doing something more interesting than litigating corruption. They may be building a factual record for a future Court that is willing to revisit the underlying premise. Whether that Court exists is another question entirely. But I would not assess the effort purely on the probability of surviving the Roberts test as presently constituted.
The argument that the First Amendment protects unlimited campaign spending is based on a specific interpretation of "speech." The counter argument is that money itself is not speech, and that large, undisclosed contributions distort democratic processes by allowing a few wealthy donors disproportionate influence. This is not a partisan issue. Both major parties benefit from this arrangement, though they often frame the problem as stemming from the other side's donors.
Both parties are in on it and Snowden proved that when you see who funds both sides you start to realize the whole game is controlled from a level so far above Congress they don't even know who's pulling the strings, and no Maine law is going to touch that.
Snowden leaked surveillance files, not a shadow government org chart. One of these things exists.
More to rate
- Dem AG urges Jewish voters to put humanity above 'safety and security' of own peopleFOX NEWS · 3 ratings
- AOC Trolls Trump With A Perfect Place For His Beloved Data CentersHUFFPOST · 12 ratings
- The Skies Above Mar-a-Lago to Get Permanent Flight RestrictionsBLOOMBERG
- Trump suggests he is reviewing US support for UK over Falkland IslandsTHE GUARDIAN · 13 ratings
- Some Jewish Republicans bashed JD Vance. He went to speak to them in person.THE WASHINGTON POST · 10 ratings
- Stacy Garrity supports ban on Flock cameras in PennsylvaniaWASHINGTONEXAMINER · 12 ratings
Maine doing what Congress won't because Congress is bought. Lessig has been screaming about this for years and nobody in power wanted to hear it because they're all swimming in the same dark money pool. A state cap on Super PAC donations is exactly the kind of pressure that exposes how fragile the Citizens United framework actually is when someone pushes back with teeth. The court challenge is the whole story here; whoever's funding the challenge to the Maine law is essentially admitting they can't operate without unlimited anonymous cash flowing into elections. That's not a side effect of the system, that's the purpose of the system. Every cycle we watch billionaires launder their policy preferences through PACs while working people get to vote on the results. Would love to see this go all the way up, even knowing what the current court will probably do with it.
"Even knowing what the current court will probably do with it."
That's the fine print. That's where this ends. Six justices who got there partly through dark money reviewing a law designed to restrict dark money. The recusal arguments write themselves and go nowhere. Maine's right. Lessig's right. The challenge funders are confirming exactly what they claim doesn't exist. "Probably" is doing a lot of work in that last sentence.