Since Buckley v. Valeo, campaign finance jurisprudence has been riven by the constitutional limits on the regulation of funded campaign speech. The Court’s enduring but unpopular compromise that contributions can be limited to prevent corruption but that the right to free speech prevents the restriction of expenditures has been assailed as both too restrictive and insufficiently robust. The debate is typically cast as a straightforward question of which source of power is the greater threat: plutocratic wealth that can corrupt leaders, or a state that can oppress its citizens. However, this intractable conflict can be unified by considering democratic governance as a matter of constituent self-rule. Neither private nor state influence over campaign media overdetermines the results of elections; both operate to influence voters. The critical question is what poses the greater threat to voter cognition and preference development. This observation, framed by a Kantian understanding of free will, captures the true core of the judicial debates – contestation over what circumstances pose the greatest threat to the autonomy of voter preference formation.

In the spring of 1974, the 31-year-old junior Senator from Delaware, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., published a law review article in which he decried the traditional system of privately financed election campaigns. Private financing, Senator Biden contended, “affords certain wealthy individuals or special interest groups the potential for exerting a disproportionate influence over both the electoral mechanism and the policy-making processes of the government.” Moreover, Biden urged, private funding poses an obstacle to the candidacies of “individuals of moderate means” and so was at odds with the “concept of American democracy [that] presumes that all citizens, regardless of access to wealth, have equal access to the political process.” In addition, he argued that private funding favored incumbents. To address the “Political Darwinism” of private financing, Biden called on Congress to adopt a system of public funding for all federal candidates.