The Republican National Committee (RNC) apparently wants to party like its 1999. It is bringing two new, overlooked lawsuits seeking to turn back the clock on campaign finance reforms in place since 2003.

Having lost the presidential election, the GOP wasted no time in challenging the constitutionality of bans on soft money and coordinated spending that were championed by its presidential nominee and signed into law by President Bush. The RNC filed one lawsuit in DC federal court that attempts to undo soft money restrictions dividing the state and national parties, and a second in federal court in Louisiana to overturn limits on coordinated spending between candidates and the national parties.

The RNC apparently has decided that it cannot compete in a political climate that limits the influence of corporate soft money. The lawsuits suggest that Republicans may seek to blame the election results on fundraising rules that require parties to cultivate many more individual donors.

Both the limits on spending coordination and the wall between the state and national parties were enacted as part of the landmark McCain-Feingold law and upheld in 2003 in McConnell v. FEC, albeit by a Supreme Court led by then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist. The rules assure that the ban on soft money given to the national parties is not easily circumvented, and that limits on contributions by individuals are not rendered meaningless by direct infusions of party funds to candidates. The RNC and its lawyer, James Bopp, are betting that the addition of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito to the Court will bode well for its back-to-the-future claims.

Regardless of how one might regard the validity of the attacks on well-established campaign finance principles, the optics for the RNC are not great. This election cycle saw record levels of voter turnout and engagement in campaigns, as well as an explosion of small donors who helped lead the Obama campaign to victory. The Obama campaign’s much-vaunted e-mail list reportedly contains more than ten million names, or 16 percent of his national supporters in the popular vote, according to an analysis in The Nation.

While the Campaign Finance Institute‘s analysis found the percentage of small donors in Obama’s fundraising to be unremarkable (because repeated gifts pushed many “repeater” donors over the $200 threshold), the number of new, small donors who played a part in this election cycle remains staggering.

Campaign finance reform opponents are also trying to use Obama’s fundraising success outside the presidential public financing system as a club to discredit the program. But reformers are not at all humiliated as the Wall Street Journal suggested, by the burgeoning small-donor revolution, record turnout and political voluntarism that marked this election cycle.

Indeed, this aspect of Obama’s success is directly traceable to McCain-Feingold. In the primary, the new rules made it possible for an insurgent primary candidate to overcome an establishment candidate and her prodigious soft-money machine. By outlawing soft money, it pushed candidates out to the grassroots for funds. As Brian Wolff, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) told The American Prospect, “[McCain-Feingold] forced us to do what we should have been doing all along, which was including more people in the political process.”

Moreover, the Obama campaign also fulfilled the vast potential of the Internet as a fundraising tool, giving the candidate more time to speak to voters. Its success suggests a model for future reforms that further encourage and empower small donors, such as public funding programs that limit large donations, while allowing small donations with a four-to-one match of public funds to make them even more important to candidates.

Every few years, opponents of campaign finance reform declare it dead, pointless or worse. By going on the attack, opponents hope to embarrass president-elect Obama out of following through on his commitment, reiterated November 1 to the Boston Globe by a campaign spokesperson, to fix the problematic presidential public financing system, which has not been meaningfully updated for thirty-five years.

That system needs work, but Congress can easily re-tool it to supercharge small donors, close loopholes for so-called “hybrid ads” paid for with party funds and furnish enough money to win in the general election. All this would be complemented by allowing candidates to continue accepting small donations throughout the election.

Obama should not be distracted by the complaints of a few couch-bound curmudgeons, or the attempts to re-litigate issues long settled. The attacks reflect a view badly out of touch with the public, whose deep mistrust of big-ticket donations that slosh money around in our democracy persists in the wake of the most expensive election in history.

A recent USA Today/Gallup poll showed that 70 percent of Americans think there was too much money spent in the 2008 presidential election. Meanwhile, 70 percent support some form of public financing for presidential elections. Significantly, 42 percent of Republicans thought that participation in the presidential public funding system should be mandatory (although public funding systems must be voluntary to be constitutional under prevailing law); 57 percent of all Americans favored spending limits, which are also unconstitutional. The intense public support for spending limits (even for mandatory public financing) shows the deep skepticism that the public harbors about the role of money in politics.

The RNC’s apparent willingness to nurture an addiction to large donations and soft money will not serve it well. The Internet age of politics is here to stay. Politicians and parties who fail to compete in grassroots politics will quickly lose legitimacy, whatever the Roberts Court decides. The RNC has won this way before, with the 2004 election only the most recent example of its organizing prowess. Rather than trying to roll back the rules, the RNC would be better off using the next four years to form policies that attract voters and develop its own grassroots appeal.

For his part, President-elect Obama should address the concerns raised by the large donors who were a significant part of his fundraising haul.

Voters do connect the dots between the money in our politics and the failed policies in Washington. An agenda for the new administration should include a codification of the principles that the Obama campaign used to revitalize the 2008 election–principles that support a small-donor model for presidential public financing, and a similar program for members of Congress.

People-powered politics is the way forward. As we’ve seen, when parties and candidates return to the grassroots, the energy and investment they generate can change democracy.

The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in a campaign finance case, Davis v. FEC. This Court has had a rather ominous track record on campaign finance reform since the appointment of Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, and the Court’s reactions to the argument do not bode well for those who care about limits on the role of money in politics.

The lawsuit concerns an obscure area of a major federal law enacted in 2003, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA). But given the Court’s considerable hostility to rules on campaign finance, demonstrated by two recent, closely decided decisions on contribution limits in Vermont and issue advertising in campaigns, the argument was yet another important sign of where the Court is headed on campaign finance matters.

A two-time-losing federal “millionaire” Congressional candidate, New York businessman Jack Davis is challenging the so-called “Millionaire’s Amendment” section of BCRA, which relaxes various contribution limits for opponents of candidates who intend to spend more than $350,000 of their own money on a campaign for federal office.

Limits are relaxed only to allow a non-millionaire to catch up with the level of spending by a self-financing candidate. This small exception to the general rule on contribution limits was designed to address part of the Court’s seminal ruling in Buckley v. Valeo, which declared that because self-financed candidates cannot corrupt themselves, campaign contributions from their private coffers could not be limited.

Mr. Davis’s improbable claim is that the additional contributions allowed for his non-millionaire opponent are a burden on his own speech under the First Amendment.

Filings in the case show that, at the FEC’s last count, since BCRA’s enactment in 2003, only sixty self-financed candidates triggered the Millionaire’s Amendment, and that of the 110 eligible opponents, only fifty-eight candidates accepted enhanced contributions. And while the pool of self-financed candidates spent more than $144 million, their non-“millionaire” opponents raised only about $8 million in contributions over the general limits.

Anti-reform groups are using the provision to attack generally applicable contribution limits, arguing that Congress cannot care about contribution limits in one context for one purpose and relax them in the narrow circumstance of self-financing.

In the argument Tuesday, a few opening inquiries from the Chief Justice and some questions from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested they may doubt whether Mr. Davis’s speech is at all burdened by relaxed limits for his opponent. But for most of the time, the Justices grappled with the meat of the constitutional claims, discussing whether the state’s interest in enhancing competition was legitimate.

Justice Ginsburg even raised concerns about the burdens from the additional disclosures required under the law, which require reports of each spending increment of $10,000 or more. Disclosure obligations, in this age of the Internet and electronic filing, are normally viewed as far less intrusive than contribution limits.

Justice Antonin Scalia seized upon the argument that changing the contribution limits to accommodate this situation made them constitutionally suspect, and we should expect broad language from him on that score.

Justice Anthony Kennedy was clearly preoccupied by provisions that relax the limits on coordinated party spending for the opponent of a self-financed candidate, although Solicitor General Paul Clement made a valiant attempt to set this issue to the side, noting that it was severable and pointing out forcefully that the record in the case contained little evidence on this aspect of the law.

The clear low point in the argument was when, in a through-the-looking-glass exchange, it became clear that the Court’s increasingly simplistic equation of money with speech may even make some Justices willing to defend the rights of the ultra-wealthy to purchase an election.

Justice Scalia threw Davis’s counsel a softball question concerning the state’s interest: “Who is more incorruptible than the millionaire, right?” Andrew Herman, counsel for Davis, replied that millionaires are “the ultimate independent,” and Scalia concurred, to laughter, noting that the wealthiest candidates among us are “the ultimate incorruptible.” While it may be true that self-financed candidates can’t be bought in the traditional ways, the Court’s myopic focus on corruption as the only cognizable constitutional interest transformed a discussion about the ingredients for a robust democracy into a chuckling old boys’ club.

If only this minor provision at BCRA were at stake, today’s argument may not have been so tragic. But far more than that may turn upon the scope of the Court’s decision.

At one point, counsel for Davis raised the notion of a public funding system as a “less restrictive alternative” to the Millionaire’s Amendment scheme. However, if the Justices employ broad language in striking down the amendment, their decision could jeopardize the basic functioning of most public funding systems, at least as they have been adopted in several states.

As the Brennan Center for Justice and our allies pointed out in an amicus brief, in upholding the law a federal three-judge panel drew upon the provision’s similarity to “trigger provisions” used in systems of public funding for elections in several states. These provide participating, publicly funded candidates with more money to match either the spending of a non-participating opponent or hostile independent spending, up to a pre-set threshold. Matching funds are critical to ensuring that the voluntary spending limits on which public funding is conditioned do not make participating candidates into sitting ducks in the face of massive outspending by their opposition.

At least one amicus brief filed with the Court takes clear aim at such measures. It is possible that a few of the more conservative Justices may craft a decision that knowingly or unknowingly imperils this innovative approach. If they do so, they will threaten public funding as a strategy for reducing politicians’ over-reliance on wealthy corporate special interests.

While most reforms concern limits of one sort or another, Buckley recognized that public funding systems produce more speech, not less. A robust system of public funding not only reduces the risk of campaign money corruption, it promotes fair competition among participants, encourages a diverse pool of candidates to run for office and allows officeholders to concentrate on the difficult policy questions they should be confronting rather than running off to fundraisers. In Maine, where 80 percent of statehouse candidates use public funding, a single mother and former waitress ran for office and won.

It would be a shame if this progressive way forward were blocked by language–whether inadvertent or intentional–from a Court decision on an anomalous section of BCRA. Viable public funding systems require a means to allow more spending when truly needed in order to maintain lower costs in general.

Losing the capacity to create a working public funding system would be a deeply unfortunate turn of events. The Roberts Court–whose newest members bill themselves as strong advocates of judicial restraint–should confine its decision to the facts at hand and reserve judgment on the balance of factors at play in a public funding case for another, and we hope, far distant day.