By Patrick Marley and Jason Stein

Conservatives had viewed getting the U.S. Supreme Court to accept the case as important. Five groups, including the Center for Competitive Politics and the Cato Institute, filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the unsuccessful effort to get the high court to take it up.

While the ruling means the end of this litigation, other lawsuits persist. The club is also involved in two challenges to the probe in state court — one of the ones before the state Supreme Court and another before a Waukesha County judge.

“The (U.S.) Supreme Court’s decision not to hear our claims does not change the fact that the only court to review the John Doe investigation found it to be an abuse of civil liberties and First Amendment rights,” O’Keefe said in a statement that referred to the ruling by Randa that has been tossed out.

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By Luke Wachob

Vox’s Matthew Yglesias writes about how efforts to create new bike lanes are hindered, ironically, by environmental protection laws:

“[A]t a high level the issue is that environmental impact review requirements were written with the general spirit of ‘Let’s worry about someone proposing to do something bad.’ Yet it turns out the exact same process that makes it cumbersome to do something bad also makes it cumbersome to do something good. And at a time when status quo transportation infrastructure is heavily tilted toward moving private automobiles and filling them with gasoline, that bias toward inaction can be very environmentally destructive.”

We could easily rewrite this paragraph to describe campaign finance laws:

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By Matt Nese

This legislation proposes a new and stunningly broad definition of “incidental committee” – by definition, organizations that only minimally involve themselves in electoral politics – and proposes to treat these organizations functionally similar to “political committees” – by definition, groups organized specifically to involve themselves in electoral politics. This new definition proposed in H.B. 2256 is of dubious constitutionality under the First Amendment for four primary reasons: (1) it ignores decades of jurisprudence establishing the necessity of a “major purpose” test; (2) it places a regulatory burden on many moderately-sized organizations in defiance of recent judicial precedent; (3) it dilutes the value of disclosure by perversely creating “junk disclosure”; and (4) it may subject individuals to harassment based on their political beliefs. As currently drafted, this bill even appears to force certain 501(c)(3) charitable organizations to report the names and home addresses of their significant supporters to the government, even though (c)(3)s by their very nature are forbidden from engaging in political activity. Moreover, because the measure references other vague provisions in existing state law, such as the definitions of “contribution,” “election campaign,” “expenditure,” and “political advertising,” and the undefined terms “support” and “opposition,” the measure suffers from additional infirmities not present on its face.

Accordingly, if H.B. 2256 becomes law, its newly proposed definition of “incidental committee” will likely be challenged. Any potential legal action will cost the state a great deal of money defending the case, and will distract the Attorney General’s office from meritorious legal work. Additionally, it is probable that the state will be forced by the courts to award legal fees to successful plaintiffs. Legal fee awards are often expensive, and can cost governments well over one hundred thousand dollars.

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By Alex Roarty

And the candidate expected to win, former City Councilman Jim Kenney, has not one but two super PACs working on his behalf, each of which has spent close to a million dollars. In a race that serves as this liberal enclave’s de-facto general election, he might never have even been competitive without the aid of the outside groups.

“Super PACs won this race,” said Dan Fee, a Democratic strategist based in the city.

It might not be long before most mayoral races—and other local contests—proceed the same way. Super PACs have made a name for themselves in federal races, where multimillion-dollar behemoths such as American Crossroads and Senate Majority PAC have become almost as important as the campaigns and party committees themselves. They’re expected to play an even larger role in next year’s Republican presidential primaries, when many of them will have far more money at their disposal than the campaigns themselves.

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By Stephen Klein

“Corruption” is now as indefinable as obscenity or hard-core pornography was to Justice Stewart. To be sure, there are unequivocal crimes of corruption by public officials and candidates. Bribery is the easiest to define, where a public servant accepts money from someone in exchange for taking an official action that benefits that person. From there, things get very muddled. Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig and other reformers have spent years arguing for an expanded definition of corruption and, in turn, expansive regulations to combat it. The definition is so expansive that it includes a corporation producing a movie about a candidate. No money ever reaches a candidate but, the argument goes, the candidate may be so ingratiated by a movie advocating for his or her election (or merely saying nice things about character, a voting record or certain policies) that the candidate might take official acts in favor of the movie’s producers or backers. If the movie is a critique of a candidate’s opponent—like, for example, Hillary: The Movie, a scathing documentary about Hillary Clinton produced by Citizens United—it’s the same result.

Hillary Clinton doubled down last week on overturning the Citizens United case that allowed Citizens United to broadcast its movie about her. This is welcome to many progressives, but it is occurring at the same time that Clinton is being hit with allegations of corruption that meet a definition far less vague and encompassing than the one touted by certain reformers. On Friday, Ken Vogel laid out one instance in an extensive story for Politico that reveals the Clinton Foundation—run by former President Bill Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, and previously Hillary Clinton—received very large contributions from a Moroccan mining corporation with questionable activities in Western Sahara. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton gave favorable treatment to Morocco—and, by extension—this mining company while paying little attention to Western Sahara.

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By Paul Avelar

The government is not allowed to ban peaceful political advocacy or violate your privacy rights just for exercising your First Amendment rights. But some activists and politicians are using the scare term “Dark Money” to shut down anonymous political speech and take away our free-speech rights.

“Dark Money” is an ominous-sounding term for what is just ordinary Americans donating to nonprofit groups that support issues they care about. For decades now these groups have been allowed to engage in political speech while keeping their donors anonymous. But today, certain activists don’t like that people can support causes and ideas without the government—and everyone else—knowing about it. They claim that anonymous speech and association is inherently suspect and must be policed.

But there is a long and proud history of anonymous political speech and association in America. From the very founding of our country—and publications like “Common Sense” and The Federalist Papers—Americans have been free to come together to make important political arguments while keeping their identities secret. Anonymity protects people with controversial views from harassment and intimidation. It allows ideas to be judged on their own merits, rather than just being subject to ad hominin attacks. And by protecting controversial speakers, we protect our own right to hear and consider the widest variety of ideas and viewpoints. Given all this, it should be no surprise that the U.S. Supreme Court has long recognized that anonymous speech and association are an honorable part of the tradition of advocacy and dissent in our country and protected by the First Amendment.

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By Dan Balz

Despite the blur of activity by innumerable candidates, the 2016 presidential campaign so far is a mostly shapeless enterprise, save for one dominant factor: the prominence of money in the narrative. More than anything, money has been the defining characteristic of the race, highlighted by the political and private activities of the brand names of Clinton and Bush.

In their own ways, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jeb Bush have brought unintentional attention to the role of money in politics and public life, to the intersection of money and political and public influence, and to the general absence of restraints, self-imposed or enforced.

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By Philip Bump

In an column at The Week, Taegan Goddard raises an interesting idea: The 2016 Republican nomination might not be settled at the ballot box, but negotiated at the GOP convention.

He makes three points.

No. 1, the Republican field is so big and has enough viable candidates that a failure to get a majority of delegates seems like a real possibility. An April Quinnipiac poll showed four candidates at or above 9 percent. When the pollsters asked for second choices among those who picked Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, four candidates got 8 percent or more as a second choice to Bush, and six got 8 percent or more as a second choice to Walker.

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By John O. McGinnis

Hillary Clinton has made her first statement about what she wants in a Supreme Court justice. Instead of focusing on jurisprudential philosophy, Clinton has laid out a litmus test defined by a particular case: her justice must be committed to overruling Citizens United.

This comment shows that Clinton wants to abridge core political freedoms and to create two classes of citizens—the scribal class which has special privileges to speak at election time and the rest of us who are prevented from disseminating our views as effectively. Recall that Citizens United was a non-profit corporation that put out a video that criticized none other than Hillary Clinton, then as now running in a primary for the Democratic presidential nomination. The McCain-Feingold legislation made such criticism by a corporation illegal in the run-up to a primary, but the Supreme Court struck down this prohibition as violating the First Amendment. The legislation  expressly exempted media corporations from its prohibitions, creating a distinction between those in the media and everyone else.

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By Dana Milbank

Nice sentiments, to be sure, but the fact that she was unveiling her Citizens United litmus test with party fat cats at an exclusive soiree (four days later, she mentioned it to voters in Iowa) tells you all you need to know about Clinton’s awkward — and often hypocritical — relationship with campaign-finance reform. 

Even as she denounces super PACs, she’s counting on two of them, Priorities USA Action and Correct the Record, to support her candidacy — a necessary evil, her campaign says. She’s also chin-deep in questionable financial activities, ranging from the soft-money scandals of her husband’s presidency to the current flap over contributions by foreigners and favor-seekers to the Clinton Foundation. Then there’s the matter of her plans to continue President Obama’s policy of opting outof the public-finance system; Obama’s abandonment of the system did as much as the Citizens United ruling to destroy the post-Watergate fixes.

Her advisers claim campaign-finance reforms will be at the top of her agenda, a sensible choice because of the deep resentment in the populace toward a political system rigged in favor of the wealthy. But she gives supporters little evidence that she’s genuine. Asked by The Post last month about the role of the pro-Clinton Priorities USA Action, Clinton shrugged her shoulders and said, “I don’t know.”

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By Hans A. Von Spakovsky

It should come as no surprise that Harvard professor Pippa Norris favors a slightly less comprehensive but no less radical plan: completely overhauling our campaign-finance system. She suggested limiting the amount of money that political parties and candidates can spend on their campaigns, a restriction that the U.S. Supreme Court held unconstitutional in Buckley v. Valeo (1976). When you limit how much a candidate can spend, you are directly restricting her political speech by limiting how much speech she can engage in. Norris sees no problem with this, citing the fact that in Britain, campaigns can spend only “$15,000 to $20,000 maximum, basically.” “You can’t buy ads,” she said. “You shove a pamphlet through peoples’ doors, that’s it, and then you meet people.”

For one, Professor Norris does not seem to grasp the enormous geographic and demographic differences between a British parliamentary district and U.S. Senate and congressional districts, which are far larger than the relatively small districts in which British candidates campaign.

But more bizarrely, this means her solution to getting more women in politics in the U.S. is making sure they 1) can’t place TV or radio political ads to raise their profile with potential voters, 2) can’t raise enough money to run an effective campaign in large districts, and 3) are limited to “shoving a pamphlet through peoples’ doors.” How that would help women candidates who are challenging incumbents is beyond comprehension.

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