Ramtin Arablui and Randa Abdelfattah

They fill the silence with their own script.

What are the upsides to having these super PACs in our politics?

If you have to come up with upsides to super PAC politics, what it means is there's more money for speech, right?

So that's the idea that people should be, in theory, more informed and have more information at their disposal.

And that more candidates potentially

have access to money and don't need to be able to reach many, many donors to be able to give flight to their campaign.

So in theory, more money means more possibilities for candidates and more discourse for voters to hear and be informed about politics.

I think that's probably the strongest argument for super PACs.

I think the worry is it doesn't really work out that way in practice.

That you end up still with kind of distributional problems where it just means the richest candidates and the richest people have more influence.

And the average voter may not be all that informed by more ads.

That the ads aren't all that informative and the money goes for all kinds of things that just make our politics worse, depending on your point of view about things.

All of the campaign finance law, there's this kind of irony about it, which is campaign finance law is all about the prevention of corruption.

That's really what the constitutional debate is about.

To what degree can the government restrict campaign finance activity to prevent corruption?

But really, what we're worried about in campaign finance reform is about...

whether the ultra wealthy just have too much influence and they sort of drown out the average people in a democracy where we're all supposed to be equal citizens.

So there is this kind of disjunction between where the law sort of centers

in terms of the debate and really kind of the political case for campaign finance reform.

And that's always been the way that conservatives who want to take down campaign finance regulation sort of aim their firepower is to say, really, this isn't about preventing corruption.