Developments in recent decades reflect diminished respect for the First Amendment. These include campus speech codes, political pressure for censorship on social media platforms, and a society-wide “cancel culture” that inspires self-censorship lest “harmful” speech “trigger” offended hearers.

The most serious speech-regulation began half a century ago, under the antiseptic rubric of “campaign finance reform.” On Wednesday, the Supreme Court can begin removing another shackle reformers have clamped on political speech. The court will consider taking a case about whether the First Amendment is violated by limits on what political parties can spend in coordination with their candidates’ campaigns.

How did such an anodyne practice become problematic? This is how:

In the 1970s, reformers, using the Watergate scandals as a pretext, restricted campaign giving and spending. This was supposedly to prevent “corruption” — quid pro quo transactions — or the appearance thereof.

Reformers regulated “hard” money given to particular candidates; then “soft” money, given to parties for organizing and advocacy. Next, they targeted independent groups’ “express advocacy” of the election or defeat of identifiable candidates. Reformers also restricted such groups’ advocacy for or against issues clearly identified with particular candidates.

On Wednesday, peak absurdity reaches the Supreme Court. It must decide whether a compelling government interest is served by limiting “coordination” between parties and their candidates. Lest the parties corrupt their own nominees?

Actual quid pro quo corruption involving donors is rare. Abundant research confirms what common sense suggests: Political contributions move to politicians’ issue positions, not the other way around. Teachers unions generally support Democrats for the same reason opponents of gun restrictions generally support Republicans: the parties’ pre-existing beliefs.

All laws regulating political competition involve government stipulating the permissible quantity of speech about the government’s composition. All campaign finance laws are written by members of the political class — by incumbent legislators. Such laws require a skeptical squint: look for evidence of class interest.

It is easy to see: Incumbency confers enormous communication advantages; challengers must spend a lot to match this. So, limits on political giving and spending protect incumbents.

For modern mugwumps bent on removing the politics from politics, the maddening “problem” is that people affected by government keep trying to affect the government’s composition. The reformers — including exhorting and a self-interested press — fret about the “problem” of “too much money” in politics. The complaint necessarily is that there is too much political speech, because all campaign spending is to fund, directly or indirectly, the dissemination of political advocacy to large constituencies.

How much, and by what metric, is there “too much” money in politics? In the 2023-2024 election cycle, candidates for federal offices (president, House, Senate) spent a total of $5.5 billion. To support them, political parties spent $2.6 billion, and political action committees spent $15.5 billion. (Reformers produced the dominance of PACs with regulations that diverted political contributions away from parties.) This $23.6 billion is less than the $29.2 billion of advertising spending in the same 24 months by just two American companies, Proctor & Gamble ($17.6 billion) and PepsiCo ($11.6 billion).

For reformers, another “problem” is too much political participation: Political contributions are how millions of citizens participate. And by supporting the rationing of political speech, the media enhance the dominance of their unregulated speech.

Campaign “reforms” threaten the core speech protected by the First Amendment: political discourse. Today, many progressive intellectuals have decided the First Amendment is a “loophole” that endangers their agenda of regulating everything, speech emphatically included. Public support for free speech might be weaker now than at any time since the First Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1791.

In 2014, 54 senators, all from the Democratic caucus, voted to weaken the Bill of Rights’ protections by amending the First Amendment to permit people like them to ration speech about people like them. They thereby acknowledged that the amendment’s clear text (“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech”) forbids the campaign reformers’ desires.

Today’s political hygienists still have a metastasizing agenda for government regulation of the quantity of campaign speech. (And the content of it: avoid “express advocacy.” And the timing of it: not too close to an election.) The result is a rococo regime of speech restrictions, and hairsplitting exemptions therefrom.

Beginning Wednesday, the court can reaffirm the First Amendment’s crystalline simplicity, the wisdom of which is as self-evident as this: No compelling government interest is served by limiting the ability of parties to coordinate with their candidates’ political speech.

The Washington Post