Money, Power, and Politics: Governance Models and Campaign Finance Regulation

A continuing constitutional debate over money and politics was left unfinished in the Supreme Court's recent, fractured decision in Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee v Federal Election Commission. Beginning with a series of stylized models that reflect different conceptions of public governance, this article suggests a constitutional framework for thinking about the role money can play in politics, and relates this framework to those models. The article then applies an agency cost approach derived from the proposed constitutional framework to suggest where the Court has gone wrong and what should have been done in the money-and-speech cases.