Democracy by the People: Reforming Campaign Finance in America

Thanks to a series of recent US Supreme Court decisions, corporations can now spend unlimited sums to influence elections, Super PACs and dark money groups are flourishing, and wealthy individuals and special interests increasingly dominate American politics. Despite the overwhelming support of Americans to fix this broken system, serious efforts at reform have languished. Campaign finance is a highly intricate and complex area of the law, and the current system favors the incumbent politicians who oversee it. This illuminating book takes these hard realities as a starting point and offers realistic solutions to reform campaign finance. With contributions from more than a dozen leading scholars of election law, it should be read by anyone interested in reclaiming the promise of American democracy.

Introduction: democracy by the wealthy: campaign finance reform as the issue of our time Timothy K. Kuhner and Eugene D. Mazo; Part I. Defining the Problem: 1. The third coming of American plutocracy: what campaign finance reformers are up against Timothy K. Kuhner; 2. Liberty, equality, bribery, and self-government: reframing the campaign finance debate Deborah Hellman; 3. Aligning campaign finance law Nicholas Stephanopoulos; Part II. Proposed Solutions: 4. Reforming campaign finance reform: the future of public funding Richard Briffault; 5. Raising all of our voices for democracy: a hybrid public funding proposal Adam Lioz; 6. Reorienting disclosure debates in a post-Citizens United world Katherine Shaw; 7. Beyond repair: FEC reform and deadlock deference Daniel P. Tokaji; 8. The People's Pledge: campaign finance reform without legal reform Ganesh Sitaraman; 9. Super PAC insurance: a private sector solution to reform campaign finance Nick Warshaw; 10. Constraining and channeling corporate political power in Trump's America Kent Greenfield; 11. Reforming lobbying Maggie McKinley; 12. Regulating campaign finance through legislative recusal rules Eugene D. Mazo; 13. Contributions and corruption: restoring aggregate limits in the States Michael D. Gilbert; 14. Developing better empirical evidence for future campaign finance cases Brent Ferguson and Chisun Lee; 15. Fixing the Supreme Court's mistake: the case for the twenty-eighth Amendment Ronald A. Fein; Part III. Inspiration from Abroad: 16. The repudiation of Buckley v. Valeo K. D. Ewing; 17. Equal participation and campaign finance Yasmin Dawood; 18. Political finance and political equality: lessons from Europe Oscar Sanchez Munoz.