I appreciate all the responses to my essay in Democracy on campaign finance reform, which were a reminder to me that much of the rethinking about how to prevent economic inequality from being reinforced by political inequality that I called for is already underway.

Most of the responses were either expansion or clarification of my points, or thoughtful alternate views, and don't really call for any reply other than gratitude. I should, however, reply to the more comprehensive critique from Paul Ryan of the Campaign Legal Center. And at the end, I'll say a bit about Jeff Faux's suggestion of a constitutional amendment giving Congress the power to limit spending.

I had a lot of trepidations about the article and the possibility that I had overstated the argument that limits-based reformers were blind to shortcomings of their own approach of endlessly chasing loopholes.

But Mr. Ryan's response (we don't know each other, which I presume is why he referred to me as "Mr. Schmitt," so I'll extend him the same courtesy), which amounted basically to shouting, "Look! Loopholes!!!" and rebutting arguments other than those I made deepened my conviction that reformers really are unable to hear skeptical voices, though I doubt that was his intent.

More than his critique of my article, I was struck that Mr. Ryan made little effort to argue that the federal campaign law as amended in 2002 has been successful on the terms promised.

Indeed, I think I'm more generous to the law than some of its supporters, as I give it credit for getting candidates out of the business of raising soft money and pushing some money into independent groups that are likely to be more ideological than the influence-seeking soft-money donors, which in some small ways are positive things.

Mr. Ryan begins by claiming that I start from a "flawed premise" that campaign finance reform began a decade ago, rather than in 1974. Indeed, if I were as ignorant as Mr. Ryan seems to think I am, my arguments would not be worth listening to, much less responding to. I'll stand by what I actually wrote: "since the radical changes of the 1974 Campaign Finance Act, [campaign reform] had been an insiders’ game, with little effort to build a grassroots movement or do more than sand down the rough edges of the system." I doubt that anyone involved would disagree that there was a significant change in the 1996-97 period, with a major influx of new money, emergence of new organizations such as the Brennan Center, Public Campaign and a few years later Mr. Ryan's own Campaign Legal Center, a concerted effort to build a grassroots movement, a concerted effort to use state and local victories to move national reform, a shift in focus from PACs to soft money and public financing, and a new set of allies. Taken together, those qualititative changes in the reform effort make the past decade a useful unit of analysis in trying to assess whether reform lived up to its own promises.

(Incidentally, 1974 is not Year Zero for reform either. Julian Zelizer's 2004 book On Capitol Hill includes a fascinating account of the reform movement of the 50s and 60s, when the best advocate for reform was the AFL-CIO lobbyist. Times do change...)

On the issue of the year-long fight over regulation of blogs and the internet, Adam Bonin's response is sufficient, and better informed. Yes, the reformers "applauded" the eventual resolution at the FEC, after fighting it for a year.

On the issue of 527 organizations, Mr. Ryan argues that most such organizations should be "registered as political committees." He's not responding to my argument here, and I basically agree. A quick definition of a 527 is that it is a group that is treated by the IRS as a political committee, and while most are also registered with the FEC as political committees, some that should be -- in that they have no purpose other than to affect federal elections -- are not. That is, indeed, a loophole. But having discovered the 527 loophole, reformers in 2003 noted that if all 527s were required to register as political committees, the next loophole that might emerge would involve some non-profit organizations (501(c)4's -- contributions to which are not tax-deductible), which could be used for the same purposes. And so if all 527s were registered as political committees, limited to hard money, the money might move to non-profits, and reformers would have to close that loophole, and then the next and the next. That was the issue I raised. As I said, each loophole-closing makes sense in its own narrow terms; it's the overall direction that's crazy. I also pointed out that all the activity that went through 527s could just as easily be done by individuals acting without an organized committee, and that such activity would be constitutionally protected. My point was that by going after organized activity, and not unorganized activity, reformers were in effect fighting political organization itself. I stand by that argument, and Mr. Ryan is welcome to respond to it, and not to some other argument.

In response to my point that reformers should not "overtax the corruption rationale," Mr. Ryan again responds to someone else's argument, suggesting that I am proposing that he and other lawyers "use limited resources to pass laws that stand little or no chance of surviving the inevitable legal challenge." NO! I am proposing no such thing! There is a faction that wants to use political equality or other rationales to justify either very low contribution limits ($100 was fashionable in the 1990s) or limits on total spending. Such reforms are unwise (low limits have the effect of pushing the entire campaign to outside groups) as well as unconstitutional. But Mr. Ryan reveals the blinkers on his vision when he writes that "courts have accepted only two justifications for campaign finance reform laws --reducing real and apparent corruption." Substitute the word "restriction" for "reform," and he is right. That is, so far, the only rationale that courts have accepted as justification for restricting campaign contributions or political speech has been corruption. But reform that expands political speech as I have proposed face no such obstacle in the courts, and indeed, a certain amount of balancing -- such as voluntary spending limits -- is possible in the context of an expansive reform. It is telling that Mr. Ryan doesn't even recognize that "reform" and "restrict" are not interchangeable words!

Mr. Ryan responds to my comments on the Supreme Court's decision to reconsider its decision to uphold BCRA's provision requiring that ads that mention a candidate in the weeks before an election be paid for with regulated money by arguing the case itself, which involves ads run by Wisconsin Right to Life (WRTL) asking voters to call Senator Feingold and ask him not to filibuster Bush's judicial appointees. I'll "have to find a better example," Mr. Ryan says, although I didn't use the specifics of that case as an example. But let's get into it: Mr. Ryan's case rests in its entirety on the argument that WRTL also opposed Feingold's reelection, and thus the ads, whatever their actual content, were really meant to influence the election. This suggests that the analysis might be different if the group supported Feingold, or was neutral in the election, even though such ads would be caught in the law's net as well. I'm sorry, but asking courts or the FEC to decide that some ads would be regulated because the sponsor's intent was to influence the election while another with similar content would be unregulated because its sponsor's intent was actually lobbying seems to me to empower government agencies to engage in a ridiculous parsing of free speech. And letting ads that really are intended to encourage the public to engage in public debate on an issue -- deeply protected political speech -- get caught in the regulatory net is equally undesirable. Far better to scrap the whole thing -- as I'm quite confident the Court will do -- and find another path.

On Mr. Ryan's other points, yes, there are indeed similarities among the kinds of expansive laws I favor and other federal laws, such as the obsolete and now failed presidential public financing system, which unlike New York City's matching system or Minnesota's tax credit has never been refined or improved. I probably drew too sharp a line between these types of reforms, but the distinctions -- which Mr. Ryan doesn't seem to see -- are as important as the similarities.

Finally, on Jeff Faux's suggestion of a constitutional amendment to allow Congress to limit total spending, he is right to say, "I think Mark’s old boss, Bill Bradley once proposed the same thing." Indeed, I have a vivid memory of getting that amendment drafted for Bradley, him signing it, and taking it down to the Senate floor myself to be introduced. And I'm ashamed of it. I want nothing to do with sullying our Constitution with an amendment that would be the very first to limit the scope of the First Amendment. Further, such an amendment would never be ratified, and should never be ratified, so those who say that there is no solution other than amending the Constitution are basically saying there's no solution. But there is promise in expansive reforms that don't force head-on confrontations with the First Amendment!