John Edwards and the Future of Campaign Finance

For the reasons outlined by Pierce,  Marcotte and especially Cohen, I’m glad that for the mistrial/acquittal in the John Edwards prosecution.   There’s essentially no chance that Edwards would have been prosecuted were it not for his adultery.  Adultery that, to be sure, was deplorable (although I continue to insist that there’s no defensible reason why Edwards is History’s Greatest Monster while McCain, Guiliani, et al, remain respected public figures), but not a good reason to press a feeble campaign finance indictment.   And as with the millions of dollars set on fire in the steroid witch hunts, as Cohen says this represents a lack of priorities on the part of the Department of Justice that offends me a great deal more than Edwards’s sexual misdeeds:

Indeed, whatever else it means, the mistrial is another courtroom embarrassment for the Justice Department and Attorney General Eric Holder, who won’t file criminal charges in the big cases people are talking about (like Wall Street fraud) but who evidently can’t get his line attorneys to succeed in these picayune cases no one wants to see brought. That’s a bad combination for a justice department, any justice department, because it suggests both a lack of value in prosecutorial priorities and a lack of trial competence. If you aren’t going to fight the big ones, you have to land the little ones.

Particularly after Citizens United, campaign finance law is increasingly looking like the worst of all worlds: the law can do nothing to stop monied interests from dominating politics, but can lie around like a loaded weapon for a U.S. Attorney with some ambition or vendetta to pursue. I’m glad that at least this time the prosecution failed, and it would be outrageous for the DOJ to re-try on the charges that the jury could not reach a verdict on.