For Jay Heck, the disease needs a cure. For Rick Esenberg, it’s doubtful there is a disease and, even if there is, the cure is worse.

If Tuesday’s “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” program at Eckstein Hall had been a meeting of foreign diplomats, the statement afterward would have described the session as “cordial but frank.”  Two of the most prominent Wisconsin voices in the debate about whether to and how to regulate money spent on political campaigning presented their views with wit and warmth, but with no masking their widely different positions.

Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, said elections in Wisconsin and nationally had devolved over the last several decades and regulation of election spending was a matter of restoring confidence in the political system.

Esenberg, a professor at Marquette University Law School and an attorney involved in a case currently challenging regulatory plans in Wisconsin, did not accept that the damage being done by current levels of spending was so serious. Limiting free speech related to elections presents, among many things, a constitutional problem and is a bad idea that often has unintended negative consequences.