If you can look beyond the hoopla, California’s recall madness makes the strongest case yet for revisiting the Supreme Court’s constitutional equation of money with “speech” – the logic that’s warped our campaign finance rules since the famous 1976 case of Buckley vs. Valeo.

Start with the obvious question: Why should a wealthy mischief-maker like Republican Congressman Darrell Issa have been allowed to spend the million or so on paid signature-gatherers needed to put a recall on the ballot and plunge the state into chaos?

In this respect, of course, the recall is merely the apotheosis of the Initiative Industrial Complex that has taken over California in the last 20 years. Everyone here knows that for a million bucks you can get pretty much anything on the ballot – that’s the ante for hiring the firms that canvass the malls to qualify whatever measure you’d like to see put before voters.

If your first instinct is to ask, “Hey – why is it legal to use paid signature gatherers, if the whole idea of ballot measures is to let ideas with broad grassroots support come forward?” you’re a true democrat with a small d – but you’re not a constitutional scholar.

As it turns out, the Supreme Court has specifically ruled that such “astroturf” measures – where phony grassroots support is simulated through paid signature-gatherers – cannot be outlawed. In the 1986 case of Meyer vs. Grant, the Court struck down a Colorado law that banned paid signature gatherers in that state’s referendum process.

Following the Buckley case, the Court ruled unanimously that such a ban “restricts access to the most effective, fundamental and perhaps economical avenue of political discourse, direct one-on-one communication.”

Clearly these justices have never been cornered in a mall and asked to sign on the dotted line by one of these paid “discoursers.” If this is what “core political speech” under the First Amendment looks like, we’re in worse trouble that we thought.

But if outlawing paid gatherers isn’t possible without the Court overturning Buckley, there’s another way Californians can fix the system: by raising the number of required signatures so that you’d need to spend not $1 million to $2 million to get on the ballot, but $10 million.

This would flush out the moral equivalent of frivolous lawsuits in a flash. There are plenty of Darrell Issas willing to spend a million or two on such schemes. There are very few who’d spend 10 million. If it took $10 million to get on the ballot in California, there would be no recall today. It’s simply a matter of money.

Yet Issa’s folly isn’t the only reason to revisit the “money equals speech” fallacy. Gray Davis’ intervention last year in the Republican gubernatorial primary is exhibit B.

Davis spent $10 million on an advertising campaign demonizing former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, attacks that helped assure that neophyte conservative Bill Simon would be the GOP nominee. (If Riordan had run in the recall, imagine how this history might have changed our view of the recall’s legitimacy.)

At the time, observers in California cooed over Davis’s move – “How shrewd! How savvy!” – confirming the deplorable trend in which people under the influence of cable television act more like pundits than citizens.

Instead, we should have said, “Wait a minute – why is Davis allowed to spend $10 million interfering in a GOP primary to destroy his toughest potential opponent?”

The answer, apparently, is “free speech” – but is that really satisfactory? Yes, politicians have been trying to influence whom their opponents will be since the dawn of campaigns. But if some billionaire pal of Davis’ had lobbed $50 million or $100 million in attack ads at Riordan, we would all have cried foul. So the question is where you draw the line.

I’ll leave it to the lawyers to fashion a fix that passes constitutional muster, but a fix we need. As all this shows, it is ultimately our interpretation of the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech that has made today’s recall circus possible – a nexus of basic rights with cold cash that no other democracy honors.

Whatever else happens between now and Oct. 7, this fact ought to inspire the kind of debate you just can’t get from your paid signature-gatherer.

Matthew Miller is a syndicated columnist. His e-mail address is: [email protected].