Former Senators  J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.) and William E. Brock, (R-Tenn.) in The Hill:

Both of us were elected to the Senate in the 1970s, and ran our campaigns under the Federal Election Campaign Act. FECA put caps on contributions and banned corporations from giving at all. Campaign spending was limited and independent expenditures were prohibited. The purpose of all this was to protect speech: the speech of those who couldn’t afford to contribute massive amounts but whose voice ought to be heard just as much by a candidate.

This system worked, and we’re extremely proud to have earned our seats in this manner. The money was sufficient to fund a good campaign with enough media to get the message out, and we could be sure it was our ideas, not our fundraising prowess, that won the day.

But in 1976, the Supreme Court got it wrong with Buckley v. Valeo: they decided that these reasonable limits on political spending to prevent corruption were a violation of the First Amendment. That case was the seed that reversed decades of jurisprudence, turned the Founders’ conception of free speech on its head and, more than thirty years later, germinated the infamous Citizens United decision.