A SIMPLE TWEAK TO CORPORATIONS LAW...:

Today's GOP rebels aren't the first lawmakers who've wanted to rock the boat. What separates them from the rebels of earlier years is that there is almost nothing that party leaders can do to keep them in check. Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has argued that in the bad old days, when pork-barrel spending and earmarks reigned, leadership could bring rebellious backbenchers to heel by threatening to withhold sweet, sweet taxpayer dollars from this or that public project in a member's district. Such tactics are now frowned upon, and Republicans have gone so far as to impose an outright ban on earmarks--one that at least some Republicans would like to reverse. 

There's another factor, which Rauch also references. Successive waves of campaign finance regulation have been designed to limit the influence of money in politics. What these regulations have actually done is quite different. In Better Parties, Better Government, Joel Gora and Peter Wallison observe that today's campaign finance regulations limit the extent to which candidates can coordinate their fundraising and campaigning efforts with central party organizations, so candidates have to build their own fundraising networks. Building such a network is fairly easy for those who've spent their lives around the very wealthy or who are very wealthy themselves. But it is much harder for less wealthy individuals who have dedicated their lives to public service or who for whatever reason aren't skilled in the art of wheedling money out of strangers. [...]

Imagine a world in which virtually all fundraising for House races was done by an official organ of the GOP, like the National Republican Congressional Committee, as Gora and Wallison recommend. Promising candidates would receive money directly from GOP HQ, so they wouldn't have to devote all of their time, or indeed any of their time, to fundraising. This would free up candidates to spend more time in their districts or on doing the nitty-gritty work of legislating. Candidates could still raise their own money or spend their own money. The First Amendment protects their right to do so. But candidates backed by the party would have an advantage over those who don't enjoy official party support, as building one national fundraising machine is so much more efficient than building hundreds of fundraising machines for individual candidates. The appeal of this party-provided campaign cash would be such that candidates would be very reluctant to lose it--so they'd be far more inclined to play ball with the party leaders who control the purse strings. 

There'd be another advantage to this system: If the parties had a freer hand in raising funds and the ability to dispatch those funds to the strongest candidates, including candidates who struggle to raise money on their own, we'd have a far more competitive political system. To be sure, party organizations in this scenario would have to raise funds from wealthy individuals and interest groups. Yet the sheer size and scope of these fundraising machines would ensure that they'd have little choice but to raise funds from a far broader collection of interests than an individual candidate, and in aggregating these disparate interests, they'd be in a better position to limit the influence of any one donor or group of donors. 

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