Quote:
Originally Posted by Reiwa
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Even though the law it struck down had only existed since 2002?
Heh, gotcha.
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The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act can be defended as a regulatory response to a specific technological transition rather than a timeless restriction on political speech. In earlier media environments, political communication was constrained by scarcity: television time, print space, and broadcast reach were all limited resources, and campaigns competed within relatively fixed boundaries. Money mattered, but its influence was partially capped by these structural bottlenecks, because even large budgets could only purchase a finite amount of exposure.
As communication technology evolved, especially with cable fragmentation and later digital advertising systems, those constraints weakened dramatically. Political messaging became scalable, continuous, and highly targeted, allowing spending to translate into far more efficient persuasion than before. Instead of competing for limited broadcast slots, political actors could now buy attention across an expanding ecosystem of platforms, meaning additional funding could generate disproportionate influence through repetition, segmentation, and precision targeting.
From this perspective, McCain–Feingold functioned as a stabilizing intervention during a period when the “money supply” in political communication effectively ballooned in impact, even if not in raw dollars alone. By restricting certain forms of high-intensity, pre-election spending and regulating soft money flows, it aimed to reintroduce friction into a system where technological change had removed many of the natural limits on amplification. The goal was not to suppress speech, but to prevent structural dominance by actors who could most efficiently convert capital into persuasive reach.
The tension that later surfaced in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission reflects this shift in assumptions. The Court treated independent political spending as protected expression regardless of technological context, while critics saw the ruling as ignoring how modern media ecosystems change the scale at which money operates. Under this view, McCain–Feingold makes the most sense as a transitional rule: necessary when technology sharply increased the leverage of money in politics, but increasingly contested once the legal framework stopped accounting for how that leverage had evolved.