The five-member conservative majority of the Supreme Court did Democrats and reformers a favor when it released its decision in Citizens United in 2010.
The ruling and its progeny, much reviled by the left, effectively banned limits on political contributions and opened the door to direct corporate financing of campaigns. In doing so, Citizens United inadvertently rescuedprogressive crusaders from their futile, century-long struggle to control the flow of money into politics.
In the absence of caps on contribution amounts — and with loosened restrictions on sources of political cash — reformers have been forced to look toward innovative legislation at the city and state level. Those local experiments have led to the development of alternative strategies for financing federal elections that focus on large, publicly funded incentives for the solicitation of small donors….
For reformers to have a chance requires post-2020 congressional redistricting with Democrats in control in such key states as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and North Carolina, allowing the party to take control of the House in 2022.
The Roberts court has deregulated campaign finance on the premise that the only legitimate grounds for restricting money in politics is to prevent explicit corruption. In doing so, however, the court has sanctioned a pervasively corrupt regime.
In his forthcoming book on campaign finance, Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California-Irvine, writes:
The more central problem of money in politics is something just as troubling but much harder to see: systems in which economic inequalities, inevitable in a free market economy, are transformed into political inequalities that affect both electoral and legislative outcomes. Without any politician taking a single bribe, wealth has an increasingly disproportionate influence on our politics. While we can call that a problem of “corruption,” this pushes the limits of the words too far (certainly far beyond what the Supreme Court is going to entertain as corruption) and obscures the fundamental unfairness of a political system moving toward plutocracy.
The long run solution, Hasen argues — with reasoning I find unimpeachable — is a Supreme Court “that will accept political equality as a compelling interest that justifies reasonable campaign regulations.”