This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Saturday, June 19th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What's a thing of value in the context of federal elections?

Is it just direct contributions of goods or money? Is it a public endorsement of a candidate? What about a

particular question and the response to it? It turns out that the answer holds

great implications for not just elections but freedom of speech and foreign policy.

Alan Dickerson is a member of the Federal Election Commission.

We spoke earlier this week about how the FEC resolves these kinds of questions.

You and I understand what a campaign contribution is,

or at least we think we do.

It's money given to a campaign that is then under the control of the campaign and then they use that money to advocate for themselves in an attempt to attract voters to their various policy positions or wishes for the

future of government. How has that idea what constitutes a contribution? How has that changed over time?

Well, I would argue it's changed since the very beginning and this is always the problem is that people have a sense of what these words mean and I think quite often those senses are

are very helpful because they give guidance you know the people who are trying to go out there and engage in politics.

But when Congress, as sometimes happens when you try to take your general understanding of a concept and make it into law,

lots of words get put on pages and complexities arise. So in this particular case, I think what you said is definitely the understanding of a contribution. But the actual law says that it's money or

instruments or basically money or anything of value given for the purposes of influencing a federal election.

And way back in the beginning, I like to call it the original Senate campaign finance law.

The Supreme Court looked at this and they said, well, that can be almost anything.

When you say something of value, we know what money is.

We know that there are brisk markets and kinds of property.

It's not that complicated to assign some sort of monetary value to those things but something of value and you said the Supreme Court had a problem with this characterization.

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