This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, May 1st, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Campaign Finance Reformers want a clean system of advocacy for candidates for public office

and attempting to comply with a Byzantine system of campaign finance laws

leaves many would-be activists to decide that it might be better to stay silent.

Two campaign finance attorneys on opposite sides of the

political aisle speak with me today. Michael G Adams, who typically

represents Republicans, and Neil Reef, who typically represents Democrats.

We spoke in April.

Citizens United is several years old now,

and we've had years of some cases following on that,

and most notably, I think, speech Now was one of the big cases that dealt

with campaign spending or spending in elections.

I don't even like campaign spending because it's not campaign spending in many cases.

So when you guys who are two people who are on the opposite side of the aisle go into deal with campaign finance issues of

independent speakers of campaigns of parties and people who just want to have an influence on the electoral

process, how is the environment different now from how it was in 2009. I remember vividly the first few years I

practiced in this area around the middle of the last decade. For the first few

years I would help a client make an ad and then I would wait for my

phone to ring and I would chew my nails wondering if we'd committed a felony because in many

states if you sought to influence an election and you didn't use money in the increments

that you had to or from the sources that you had to, if it was not personal money, if it was

...