Free The Intimidation Game by Kimberley Strassel

legislation under the headline “Cynics United.” The left nicknamed the bill “do little and delay.” DeLay-Doolittle never did get a vote. And it would come under retrospective ridicule when DeLay a few years later was indicted in a finance probe. But the bill mattered. It staked out for years the conservative position on campaign finance: disclosure, disclosure, disclosure. That position would last right up to the point at which the right’s grassroots supporters became IRS quarry.
    Not every conservative fell for it, though, even in the early days. In 1996, a little-known faculty member at Capital University Law School in Columbus, Ohio, by the name of Brad Smith published an article in the Yale Law Journal under the title “Faulty Assumptions.” Smith laid out a precise and damning critique of campaign finance laws. They were based on incorrect beliefs about the effect of money in politics, and they inspired perverse consequences, he wrote. The article, and his follow-up book, Unfree Speech , turned him into a nationally recognized free-speech expert. He became a fixture at congressional hearings; his voluminous writings worked their way into judicial decisions.
    Mostly, Smith became a guiding influence on the conservative turn against political-speech laws. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, one of Congress’s most ardent free-speech defenders, would ultimately send Smith’s name to the Clinton White House as a GOP choice for the FEC. The academic was by then so controversial that the left staged near-riotous objections to the nomination, and the confirmation process dragged on and on. When he finally got a vote, in May 2000, thirty-four Democrats (and John McCain) voted no in protest. The New York Times would begrudgingly title him the “intellectual powerhouse” behind the conservative movement’s new effort to deregulate finance laws. His opponents—including Democrats and so-called good-government groups—immediately despised him, deriding him as a “flat-earth society poohbah.” One editorial page would liken him to David Duke, the Unabomber, and Slobodan Miloševi ć —all in the same article.
    That’s amusing, because Smith is the furthest thing from a Serbian dictator. He’s from Michigan, and he has that understated midwestern thing going on. He’s a law professor, and he looks the part. He has a wry sense of humor. (Underappreciated fact: Some of the quirkiest people in America are campaign finance lawyers.) Smith’s particular gift, however—and what makes Democrats dislike him so—is his ability to use uncomfortable realities in crafting his arguments, and to then make those arguments in ways that average people can understand.
    Smith’s early criticisms of campaign finance laws are now the standard case against “reform”: The laws protect incumbents; they lock out new entrants to the political scene; they force candidates to spend all hours of the day and night fund-raising (rather than governing); they reduce political accountability; they kill free speech. They are inherently unfair; they give vast rights to the press, but deny them to average Americans. They are ineffectual; money always finds a way, and the laws drive it to darker places. What particularly drove the left doolally about Smith was his ability to blow up their most basic arguments. The “reformers”: Money in politics is corrupting. Smith: How can it be corrupting to spend money to try to convince someone to vote a certain way? Isn’t that just democracy?
    What was most notable about Smith’s work—even his earliest tracts—was his skepticism of disclosure laws. Most Republicans didn’t buy into his cautionary note; disclosure was their political cover, and they were sticking with it. Even other conservative scholars didn’t agree; disclosure simply sounded too good. His wariness would nonetheless prove justified, and in the wake of the IRS and other targeting, he’s only grown in his belief that,