This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 5th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Carl Rove's American Crossroads is claiming that the President is using an activist group

to sell access to his schedule.

Paul Sherman, an attorney at the Institute for Justice, argues that by raising the specter

of money in politics, American Crossroads is working against free speech wins in recent years.

American Crossroads is a super PAC that was formed before the last presidential election, and they've put out an ad now

criticizing a new nonprofit group called Organizing for Action. Organizing for

Action is a direct outgrowth of the president's former Obama for

American for America campaign and they are now raising money to try and promote the president's agenda.

What American Crossroads is saying is that this is corrupt, that they are organizing for access, as the ad calls and so they're they're being pretty

scathing in their criticism of this organization. Of course it's sort of

the dog biting the hand that feeds it, that is to say super PACs wouldn't have existed.

And this kind of speech might be more difficult to facilitate were it not for court decisions that explicitly allowed particular interests

to express themselves more obviously in the electoral system.

That's exactly right.

There's definitely an irony to a group like American Crossroads bringing this criticism

because American Crossroads as a super PAC only exists by virtue of recent Supreme Court and other

federal court decisions that have struck down campaign finance laws

most notably the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United versus Federal

Election Commission and then also a decision in a case that the Institute for

Justice and the Center for Competitive Politics litigated called SpeechNow

...