The Court's new campaign finance decision doesn't go far enough

This secretive, confusing system is already shaping up to make a mess of the 2016 presidential elections, as many of the likely candidates on both sides establish supposedly “independent” SuperPACs run by their former staff and loyal supporters that will spend hundreds of millions on activities the candidates themselves can claim they’re not responsible for.

A far better solution would be the one Justice Clarence Thomas advocates in his concurring opinion to today’s ruling: we should abolish the meaningless distinction between “contributions” to specific candidates and “expenditures” on their behalf (the kind of work SuperPACs do today, such as running attack ads against opponents and distributing mail encouraging supporters to vote).

In practice, this would mean allowing unlimited contributions directly to campaigns, so Americans could hold the candidates themselves responsible for how the money is spent. I’d add the provision that all significant contributions should be reported publicly on the Internet in real-time, which would make for a far more transparent and accountable campaign finance system than we have today.