Daily Beast: The Right Is Dominating the Dark-Money Game. Kavanaugh Will Make It Worse.

Daily Beast: The Right Is Dominating the Dark-Money Game. Kavanaugh Will Make It Worse.

Well, conservatives have had their sights set on these limits for a long time. According to Paul Seamus Ryan from Common Cause, two contributions-limits cases currently have certiorari petitions before the Supreme Court, one from Montana and the other from Texas. “Both jurisdictions’ limits were upheld by the circuit courts—and the plaintiffs/petitioners in both cases are asking the Supreme Court to hear their cases and declare the challenged contribution limits unconstitutional,” Ryan told me Wednesday.

The other day, Missouri Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill—locked in a tight race against a Republican challenger who’s a leading plaintiff in a lawsuit that would deny health coverage to 2.5 million Missourians, is extremely anti-abortion, and is generally one of the harder-right Senate candidates running this cycle—said an interesting thing.

At an appearance at Missouri State University in Springfield, when asked about Brett Kavanaugh, McCaskill suggested that his posture on Roe v. Wade was maybe not her No. 1 concern. What was instead?

Campaign finance law. “So there are some voters that the only issue they care about is outlawing all abortions, and there are other voters that the only issue they care about is keeping access to abortion legal,” McCaskill told reporters. “What is more common is a large number of people concerned about dark money.”

Roe v. Wade is awfully important, make no mistake about that. But McCaskill’s point deserves a few minutes of your time. The reality of the dark money situation is terrifying and can best be put like this: If Kavanaugh is confirmed, the last remaining campaign finance limitations are almost certainly dead, and this country will soon become an outright oligarchy—a government by the few. …

Right now, there are basically no limits on spending. Spending is speech, remember? There are, however, still limits on contributions—basically, $2,700 per election. This limit has been in place since the early 1970s, and the Supreme Court upheld it in 1976’s Buckley v. Valeo.

Well, conservatives have had their sights set on these limits for a long time. According to Paul Seamus Ryan from Common Cause, two contributions-limits cases currently have certiorari petitions before the Supreme Court, one from Montana and the other from Texas (you can read up on the Montana case here, and the Texas case here). “Both jurisdictions’ limits were upheld by the circuit courts—and the plaintiffs/petitioners in both cases are asking the Supreme Court to hear their cases and declare the challenged contribution limits unconstitutional,” Ryan told me Wednesday.