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Electoral reform is a graveyard of well-intentioned plans gone awry. It doesn't take an Einstein to discern a First Law of Political Thermodynamics-the desire for political power cannot be destroyed, but at most, channeled into different forms-nor a Newton to identify a Third Law of Political Motion-every reform effort to constrain political actors produces a corresponding series of reactions by those with power to hold onto it.
Consider a few simple examples. The Supreme Court finally broke the lockhold of the self-interested refusal to redistrict in the landmark Baker and Reynolds decisions.' Three decades later, however, the political gerrymander is not only alive and well; it has assumed the role of an institutionalized industry that seems largely immune from substantive review.2 Similarly, the Court's jurisprudence under the Equal Protection Clause3 and the Voting Rights Act of 19654 was intended to dampen the effect of racial polarization and to allow for a more inclusive system of representation. But the combined effect of searching judicial review for race-based claims and muted standards of review for claims of partisan exclusion has led to the recasting of essentially political challenges born of electoral frustration as racial ones.5 Far from diminishing the role of race in politics, current doctrine may exacerbate it.
No area, however, can top the aborted reform agenda of the Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974,6 as truncated by Buckley v. Valeo,' for their paradoxical ability to bring about perverse consequences. A quarter-century after FECA, the conventional view is that American politics is more vacuous, more money driven, more locked up than ever.8 Campaign finance reform is now its own cottage industry with innumerable proposals for statutory and constitutional change and corresponding debates about how some immaculate vision of politics can be forged.9
Most of the legal-academic debate about campaign finance begins with Buckley and its progeny and focuses on whether and to what extent additional regulation comports with the First Amendment.'o Unfortunately, the debate often stops there as well. Because many of the participants in the campaign finance debate are relatively unfamiliar with the more general history of electoral reform or are largely uninterested in the practical details of political regulation, their proposals offer only a static analysis of a dynamic process. They ignore the...