Yes, Kavanaugh will be confirmed. This week, we have a bunch of theatrical bullshit that will take place in the Senate, including the always-entertaining duping of Susan Collins, but it's all theater. This is a done deal unless Kavanaugh strips naked and runs around the chamber yelling something about spiders crawling all over his body. And even then, Trump will tell you that the "fake news" edited out the spiders for their video feeds, so...
Anyway, here's the most important thing you should ask yourself about Kavanaugh's implications for campaign finance law. Do you want to know where large checks come from, or would you rather remain ignorant about their sources? That's it. Those are your choices. I don't care whether or not you want the checks to not exist. That isn't an option, and never has been. Prior to the passage of the 1974 amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act, money went wherever donors wanted, essentially. Then, FECA 1974 limited donations and expenditures. In 1976, two things happened. The Federal Election Commission issued a ruling saying that parties could raise donations in unlimited amounts, as long as those checks went to "party-building activities," but by the 1990s, they found a loop-hole to use those for ads. The other thing that happened in 1976 was Buckley v. Valeo, in which the SCOTUS struck down FECA 1974's limits on expenditures as unconstitutional limits on speech. The Court has never ruled that "money is speech." Anyone who ever feeds you that line of bullshit doesn't know the law. Ads are speech. Ads cost money. Limiting expenditures limits speech. So, SCOTUS struck down the expenditure limits while upholding the contribution limits.
That set-up meant that independent groups could spend as much as they wanted under the banner of "issue advocacy," so donors could give to independent groups, or eventually, to parties when they started using soft money for what were basically campaign ads. Soft money checks to parties, though, were clearly disclosed.
Then, along came some jackass named John McCain, who got caught up in the Keating 5 scandal, and wanted to pull a Jedi mind trick on the credulous press to make them forget about his corruption by becoming Mr. Campaign Finance Reform. Since it was all a scam, it didn't matter how poorly thought out the bill was. In 2002, he and Russ Feingold pushed through BCRA, which banned soft money donations to parties. The money didn't go away. It went to 527s, who didn't disclose their donors. They spent their money in the early part of the campaign, until Citizens United came along, and then SpeechNow, and the result was that we have "superPACs," which essentially do what 527s did, right after BCRA, but without the bifurcated structure of the campaign where the independent groups spent their money in the early part, leaving the campaigns to run their ads at the end. Now, it all runs together, but that's all Citizens United did. It ended the bifurcated structure of independent money then candidate money.
Right now, any donor who wants to give unlimited money to a campaign can do so. Just give to or create a superPAC.
What, then, are people like Hasen worried about? A decision called McCutcheon v. FEC. When SCOTUS ruled in Buckley, they made a clear distinction between campaign contribution limits and expenditure limits. They said that expenditure limits weren't kosher, but contribution limits were as kosher as gefilte fish. And just as tasty. Here's the quirk. There was a provision that limited the total amount that individuals could contribute to all campaigns, in total. In McCutcheon, the Court struck that down. You can now make limited contributions to as many campaigns as you want.
The reasoning behind the aggregate limit was to prevent money laundering. Don't let someone give $1000 to a bunch of campaigns, which then funnel those checks to one guy. The Court said, fuck that, free speech. And in doing so, they started, for the first time, to categorize contributions as speech.
Take that to its logical conclusion, and you can't have contribution limits any more than expenditure limits. This was an attack on the division between contribution and expenditure limits created in Buckley. The next step after McCutcheon is to let people write as large a check as they want to any one candidate.
Freak the fuck out, right? No. There is an impulse among a lot, particularly on the left, to see any campaign finance restriction as inherently good, and the striking down of any such law as inherently bad by giving power to the rich, or something. It doesn't work that way.
Anyone who wants to give unlimited money is doing so now. They just aren't disclosing it. Get rid of contribution limits, and they give their money to the campaigns themselves. And it gets disclosed. Do you want the money disclosed or not? Those are your choices.
I don't care if you want a unicorn or a Pegasus. Those aren't options. You can have a broken down old donkey, or you can walk with no shoes across jagged rocks. Take your pick.
Campaign contributions have never truly been limited. Do you want the contributions disclosed or not? That's it.