It was another borrowed English practice that had aroused almost as much debate there as it has continued to arouse here. In both countries the practice has created periodic uneasiness now for two centuries, but continues, albeit in very different forms. But the uneasiness also has to do with uncertainties about the appropriate role of financial support of issues in political debate. Campaign finance is an equally old and equally troubling problem that cries for a rationality unwanted even by many of its supporters, but without the added value of a tax exemption. Where the distinction between campaign finance and advocacy is concerned, one returns ultimately to the difference between the support of an individual and the support of an idea.
Funding gives individuals political power.
Funding gives disembodied ideas a particular reality they can achieve in no other way. Whether it also gives ideas political power is the fear that generates this opposition. The fact that such power can come only through the working out of the constitutional processes by the individuals we elect to manage our politics is the protection we have against the power of advocacy. If we are still afraid of that power, it is the state which must be made to protect us through the powers of rational decision-making we expect of it, not a restriction of our right to press our demands on the state by increasing the cost of doing it as a punishment for doing it at all. Even the threat of such a punishment violates our tradition by the use of political power against it.