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that informs and guides the political process essential to a republican form of government. Until recent years, the amendment was not understood to have anything to do with topics such as pornography and very little to do with subversive advocacy of revolutionary violence and law breaking. But now the First Amendment, as interpreted by Court majorities, has gone soft at its center while it becomes increasingly severe at its fringes.
    The Speech Clause began to go soft with the 1976 decision in
Buckley
v.
Valeo
(1976). The Supreme Court upheld portions of the
Federal Election Campaign Act
limiting individual contributions to political candidates to quite small amounts, but held invalid restrictions on political expenditures. Though the statute was presented as an anti-corruption measure, its real effect was to limit and distort political speech. Had the Court-approved limits been in place in 1968, for instance, Eugene McCarthy’s challenge to President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, a contest that persuadedthe president not to seek re-election, could not have been mounted. McCarthy’s campaign depended on very large individual contributions; he could not, in the time available, have raised the necessary funds from tens of thousands of small contributors.
    Limiting contributions inhibits political speech in two ways. First, candidates are forced to spend large amounts of time raising money in small amounts – time they would otherwise devote to campaigning. Second, contributors make it possible for candidates to advance the contributors’ views. The Court held that restrictions on contributions were valid because of the fear of corruption, or even the appearance of corruption. These concerns, however, could have been dealt with by public disclosure requirements.
    The Federal Election Campaign Act and the decision in
Buckley
v.
Valeo
, moreover, have shifted political power in America toward those with the leisure to engage in political activity – toward students, toward labor unions with members willing to engage in door-to-door campaigning and to run telephone banks, toward journalists and those with free access to the media, toward candidates with great personal wealth they are free to spend, and toward incumbents who have provided themselves with a variety of political resources at public expense. Many of these shifts in power were planned intentionally by the groups favored, and most of them favor the New Class’s liberal agenda.
    Matters have not improved since 1976. In
Nixon
v.
Shrink Missouri Government PAC
(2000), the Court uphelda state law imposing even more drastic limitations on political contributions, in part to “democratize” political power and in part because, as Justice Stevens’s concurrence put it, “Money is property; it is not speech.” The first rationale is a perversion of the First Amendment. If democratization or equalization of speech were a valid reason, the Court should uphold a requirement that networks and newspapers employ equal numbers of liberal and conservative commentators. As to the second rationale, it would justify a ban on an owner’s donation of his auditorium for a campaign rally or a homeowner’s use of his living room for a political meeting. It might equally be said that telecasting equipment is property and not speech, but it is property without which political speech in a mass democracy would be utterly ineffective. It is difficult to see in
Shrink
anything other than what the dissenters said it was – a substantial suppression of political speech. The Court’s disrespect for the central concern of the First Amendment bodes ill for freedom of political speech as new restrictions on campaign financing are proposed.
    Any version of the First Amendment not built on the political speech core and confined by it, if not to it, will prove intellectually incoherent and will leave judges free to legislate as they will. Both of these unfortunate results stem