The arbitrariness of campaign finance law

George Will on why you may be out of luck if you’re the thirteenth donor in Minnesota. [syndicated/Owatonna, Minn., People’s Press] In a different sense, however, campaign finance law can be seen as quite calculated as opposed to arbitrary:

Eugene McCarthy, a Democrat who represented Minnesota in the U.S. Senate from 1959 to 1971, said that in Washington anything said three times is deemed a fact. It is constantly said that today’s campaign regulations are “post-Watergate” reforms. Many were indeed written after the Nixon-era scandals. But the push for more government regulation of political speech began because Democrats were dismayed by what McCarthy accomplished [in challenging incumbent President Lyndon Johnson] in 1968.

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