This op-ed by Linda Greenhouse in the NY Times is worth excerpting:

Taken as a whole, the campaign finance picture is beyond dreary. It is particularly confused and tense as the year winds down. The Supreme Court justices left this week for a monthlong recess without accomplishing the one thing that nearly everyone assumed they would have done by now: decide the major challenge to existing federal restrictions on political spending by corporations. The court heard the case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, in a special sitting on Sept. 9, nearly a month before the term began.

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This was an aggressive move by the court’s new deregulatory majority: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony M. Kennedy. In their view, a robust First Amendment right to political speech, for corporations as well as individuals, trumps all or nearly all rationales for regulating money in politics — including those the Supreme Court accepted as recently as 2003, when it upheld the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. That decision, McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, is one of the rulings the court is now reconsidering, along with another from 1990.

I can only assume that the other justices, in whose view the First Amendment need not be interpreted to strangle Congress’s ability to regulate the flow of money into politics, see this exercise in self-help for what it is: a hijacking that has turned a minor case into an agenda-driven vehicle for undoing the status quo. A tenet of judicial minimalism is that at the very least, the court waits to be asked, rather than reaching out to decide the profound questions of the day.

I realize that uncertainty is an undesirable trait in an opinion columnist, but I have to confess to long-standing agnosticism on the campaign finance issue. I take the First Amendment arguments seriously, and I think that the provision of McCain-Feingold at issue in the original Citizens United case — banning corporate-paid “electioneering communications” from the airwaves during the weeks before an election — goes too far toward suppressing legitimate expression.

But I also believe that the First Amendment doesn’t require resigning ourselves to seeing democracy auctioned off to the highest bidder. It is, in other words, an exquisitely tough issue, made no simpler by decades of inconsistent Supreme Court decisions that have produced legal doctrine so muddled as to be “beyond incoherence,” in the words of Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

Hasen is right, but I believe that incoherence is a result of the Court’s determination in the original campaign finance regulation case Buckley v. Valeo, in which they decided that money is the equivalent of speech and struck down limitations on how much candidates could spend on their own campaigns. This has meant that for over thirty years now the only limitation on campaign spending has been how much candidates could get their hands on, with their contributors doing their best to get around the system by “bundling” contributions, spending on behalf of candidates, “soft money” contributions to political parties, etc., etc.  So a system that was designed to protect the free speech of candidates for office, instead provides wealthy contributors, political insiders, corporations and other politically-interested organizations with more speech than little people like you or I. That fact, combined with the ever-increasing expense of campaigns is why, for example, perfectly legitimate reforms of the health care system can be stalled by a handful of House Representatives and Senators who just happen to be getting hundreds of thousands or millions in contributions from the insurance industry.

There are numerous possible alternatives to the present system, but no one has any incentive to try them so long as they can somehow get their hands on contributions under the present rules, rules that the Supreme Court is set only to loosen. Do you like living in a country where your democracy is for sale? You should get used to it. It’s only going to get worse.