The current election campaign will be the most expensive in US history. Each election since the 1970s has set a new record and this has accelerated recently. In 2008 the combined expenditure on elections for the presidency, the House of Representatives and Senate, and local referendums rose to $5.3bn, up 27% from 2004. Barack Obama spent $730m in 2008, twice as much as George W Bush in 2004, and 260 times more than Abraham Lincoln in 1860. In 2012 the total bill was over $6.3bn, $2.6bn of it spent by the presidential candidates; this year, several estimates suggest $5bn will be spent. This deluge is the consequence of a funding model that allows individuals and legal entities to generously fund any candidate’s campaign. Congress has occasionally passed laws to try to curb a system criticised for over a century, but its legislation has, through a process of deregulation through litigation, been diluted or rendered ineffective by the Supreme Court.

Theodore Roosevelt complained in his “Oversight of Corporations” speech in 1902 about the excessive hold of big money on US politics, but that didn’t stop him soliciting the financial backing of railway and insurance companies and big banks to secure re-election in 1904. There was a public outcry and Roosevelt later asserted that “corporations should not be allowed to contribute to political campaigns; federal elections should be publicly financed.” In 1907 the Tillman law was passed, forbidding businesses from contributing directly to election campaigns. The Federal Election Campaigns Acts (FECA) of 1910 and 1925 set maximum amounts for donations and expenditure, but they remained mostly theoretical as there was no independent authority to police them. To get round the Tillman law, companies set up Political Action Committees (PACs) and encouraged their employees to donate to particular campaigns through them.

Only presidential candidates are eligible for public funds under the 1971 FECA, amended in 1974. But in 1976 the (...)