To appreciate the tortured path of the efforts to control the power of money in American politics from the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in 2002 to January’s Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which reversed much of that law and undermined a few others, we must first understand the problem that reformers were trying to solve. They were not trying to make mortal the eternal problem of “money in politics”, or even “big money in politics.” Rather, they were responding to a specific set of changed circumstances: In the second half of the 1990s, the evolution of political communications and a sharply increased flow of money into elections had led to the failure of the existing regulatory regime.

By the elections of 1996 and 1998, the regulatory structure created in the post-Watergate Federal Election Campaign Act, as modified by the Supreme Court’s 1974 decision in Buckley v. Valeo, had essentially broken down. Contribution limits of $1,000, combined with the escalating cost of campaigns run almost entirely via television advertisements, made elections dreary affairs. Incumbents could build up massive war chests with the help of their parties, lobbyists and outside groups, while most challengers failed, or were simply deterred from trying, for lack of money. After significant turnover in the House of Representatives in both 1992 and the Gingrich Revolution of 1994, re-election rates for congressional incumbents shot back up to 98 percent later in the decade. The Republican challenger to President Clinton in 1996, Bob Dole, never got out of the starting gate thanks in large part to a huge advertising push by the incumbent in late 1995, while Dole was still trying to sew up his party’s nomination.