With still no Supreme Court decision on the Citizens United v FEC case, I thought our readers would find my colleague Eliza Newlin Carney's column on how campaign finance reformers are already shifting strategies in response to the Internet's impact on fundraising and in preparation for the outcome of the Court's decision:

Herewith the column:

The Supreme Court has yet to issue its long-anticipated ruling on corporate political spending, but many campaign finance activists and experts are already convinced that American elections will never be the same.

Good government groups, gearing up for a ruling that could dramatically roll back existing rules, have mobilized a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign to promote public financing for congressional and presidential candidates.

A cadre of leading campaign finance scholars, sensing the high court's deregulatory tilt, has proposed a comprehensive new model for financing elections that stresses mobilizing small donors instead of reining in big money.

Reform advocates are convinced that Citizens United v. FEC will ultimately boost support for public financing.

"The direction of judicial rulings is clear," said Brookings Institution senior fellow Thomas Mann at a Jan. 14 event to release the report. "There's no question about that. The only question has to do with the speed at which the court moves to rule against some prior restrictions on political spending and contributions."

Titled "Reform In An Age Of Networked Campaigns," the report promotes public financing for state, congressional and presidential candidates, as well as measures to free up political party spending and improve internet access, transparency and reporting.

Its co-authors are "the four amigos of campaign reform," as Brookings Institution Director of Governance Studies Darrell West dubbed them during introductions at the think tank: Mann; Colby College professor Anthony Corrado; Campaign Finance Institute Executive Director Michael Malbin and American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Norman Ornstein.

The campaign finance debate is at a "crucial turning point," noted Malbin, due to changes in the technological, legal and regulatory landscape. Apart from the merits of any particular court case, Malbin added, "there are limits to what you can accomplish through limits."

Certainly the Supreme Court's pending ruling in Citizens United v. FEC could be a watershed. Argued in March of last year, the case initially challenged federal election laws dating to 2002 that would have required a conservative group to disclose who underwrote its film attacking Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 presidential race.

But the high court deferred a ruling last year and instead asked for additional oral arguments on whether it should revisit the constitutionality of a decades-old ban on direct corporate campaign expenditures. At issue is whether the court should overturn its landmark 1990 ruling, Austin v. Michigan State Chamber of Commerce, which upheld that ban. Anticipated last week, a ruling could now come as early as this week.

A ruling to reverse Austin would be "catastrophic, disastrous, unfortunate," said Bob Edgar, president of Common Cause, who like many reform advocates warns that campaigns would be swamped by massive corporate and labor union expenditures. "I can imagine this is going to be one of the largest and most important decisions made in some time on the issue of money in politics."

Should that occur, Edgar predicted, the White House and Congress would pursue short-term fixes such as legislation to require shareholders to sign off on corporate campaign expenditures. But the ruling's big impact, Edgar and other reform advocates are convinced, will be to boost support for public financing.

Common Cause is one of more than half a dozen advocacy groups that have joined in a coalition to push for passage of the Fair Elections Now Act, a congressional public financing bill that has 126 backers in the House and six in the Senate. The bill would provide matching payments for qualified small-dollar contributions.

Common Cause has also teamed up with Public Campaign to push for the public financing bill in a high-dollar lobbying campaign that aims, in part, to rally lobbyists themselves and business leaders behind the bill. A Common Cause official would not confirm a Mother Jones report that the groups would spend $4 million over six months, but said it would be a "multimillion-dollar" effort.

The report released by Brookings, AEI and CFI last week also advocates public financing across the board, but with a different emphasis. The report stresses the Internet's potential for boosting low-dollar contributions and recommends multiple matching funds for small contributors. It also suggests making public subsidies contingent not on spending limits, but on lower contribution limits.

"Instead of trying to further restrict the wealthy few, we seek to activate the many," noted Mann. The report advocates opening up political communications through affordable broadband and other means; improving transparency with real-time, downloadable, centralized disclosure databases; and ending limits on what political parties may spend in coordination with candidates.

"We'd like to take as many of these arguments out of the Supreme Court or the judicial system as we can, and move them to another plane," Ornstein said of the plan. "And if you focus as we have on things like disclosure, access to communications tools and incentives to broaden participation, those ought to be places that don't involve as much litigious activity."

It's anyone's guess how the Supreme Court will rule, of course. And public financing is hardly going to be an easy sell to a Congress that benefits from the current system and faces other pressing priorities. But whatever the outcome in Citizens United, the campaign finance world is on the verge of big changes.