Conservative campaign finance nabobs Samuel Issacharoff and Pamela Karlan on why campaign finance reform is a bad idea:

"[Issacharoff and Karlan's] normative critique attacks the vision of politics that they see underpinning the reformers' case. To their minds, reform necessarily rests on an 'idealistic' or a 'republican-communitarian perspective' that is wrong-headed as a normative matter and unrealistic as a descriptive one. Reformers, they believe, think politics should be thoughtful, deliberative, and aimed at the public good. Such a view, they argue, violates equality because it devalues the ways many ordinary people actually make decisions and would shift power 'towards those individuals who are good at making political arguments for themselves and away from individuals who depend on others to make their arguments for them.... [I]t is hardly surprising that the scholarly argument for campaign reform would produce a world in which intellectuals would have more influence and the persons they have chosen not to be -- businessmen or the people who devote their working hours to earning a living in a fashion that does not involve having and disseminating deep political thoughts -- will have less.'"

In what incredibly bizarre world is that argument -- that campaign finance reform is a bad thing because it would shift power toward smart people and away from dumb people -- a legitimate one?

(The quote comes from this excellent book on campaign finance law, and in particular from a chapter written by the smartest man in the world.)