Prohibiting "contributions" to candidates, has to infringe on a kind of free speech.
Regardless, I think the real solution would be campaign laws similar to the UK's. It's my understanding that each candidate is given the same hard cap on campaign spending, which encompasses everything from advertising to the cost of sleeping on a friend's couch while traveling. Every candidate's expenditures are diligently recorded and easily audited if necessary, and it creates a level playing field.
And how do you deal with third parties who advocate for issues? If Candidate A and Candidate B have a different position on something, it's pretty clear who you're helping if you blanket the airwaves supporting Candidate A's side of the issue even if you're not explicitly addressing either candidate. Does that come out of his budget? Do we restrict unaffiliated groups?
Those sorts of restrictions have been tried in the US, and each time they get circumvented by (officially) unaffiliated groups.
If you're campaigning issues, then you'll get candidates on board that support those issues. It shouldn't be the other way around.
I don't fully understand how the UK does it, and maybe it's not any better than what we've got, but when you have people flagrantly buying bills and politicians in Washington then we know at the very least that what we have now does not work. If we can't find some way to make it work, then a drastic change is in order.
In my life I've seen this cycle maybe five or six times, and each time we fiddle with campaign finance laws they get more complicated, leaving more gray area. When the power brokers act nobody can even tell if they've broken the law.
But if it displaces another expense, it causes them to pocket the monetary savings from that expense.
>Every candidate's expenditures are diligently recorded and easily audited if necessary, and it creates a level playing field.
Even the independent expenditures? Like, if someone goes around buying ads because they just like Candidate X so much, does that count against X's budget? Probably not, hence why that approach doesn't quite resolve the Citizen's United issues -- the problem was the advocacy of people unrelated to a campaign.