Lawrence Lessig: The Buckley Overreach
Michael Ramsey
Lawrence Lessig (Harvard Law School) has posted The Buckley Overreach (Fifty Years of Buckley v. Valeo (G. Stone & L. Bollinger, eds; Oxford University Press) (forthcoming 2025)) (21 pages) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Under both the Court's current Buckley test and under any plausible version of originalism, contributions to independent political action committees are regulable. SuperPACs are, therefore, not constitutionally required - 14 years of mistaken lower court rulings not with standing.
I'm sympathetic to this view from an originalist perspective. At least, I haven't heard a good originalist defense of the campaign-contributions-as-speech argument.