Despite the hype, the impact of the Supreme Court's decision striking down aggregate donation limits Wednesday is limited. The ruling doesn't mean that people can give unlimited amounts of money to candidates; it means a small pool of well-heeled donors can simply dole out donations to more candidates and party committees.
But campaign finance reform advocates are getting increasingly nervous over the longer-term impact of the Court's McCutcheon v. FEC decision, bolstered by other recent rulings on the subject. Experts see the possibility of a future battle over a more consequential subject: the decades-old cap on the amount an individual donor can give to a campaign.
Wednesday's 5-4 decision raised the possibility that the next step for those opposed to campaign finance regulations will be to contest the legality of individual donation limits, a bedrock principle of the current system. That such a move is even being discussed now is indicative of how much the courts have rewritten the laws governing money in politics.
