The destructiveness of Citizens United

Few foresaw this in 2010, when the Supreme Court launched us onto a dark path. The court’s 5–4 Citizens United decision, allowing unlimited corporate, interest-group, and individual spending on elections, did trigger dire predictions from plenty of doomsayers. But even the most pessimistic among them fell short of imagining American reality today.

  The Bulwark

I disagree about the "few". When it passed the Supreme Court, most of us knew it would be one of the worst decisions in history. But I'd say even more than a few were pessimistic enough to envision today's reality.

“We knew that it was going to be really, really destructive for our democracy,” says Tiffany Muller, president of the group End Citizens United, which is dedicated to electing Democrats committed to seeing the ruling overturned. “Fifteen years after that decision, we’re seeing the full culmination of living under a Citizens United world—where it’s not just elections that are for sale, but it’s that our entire government, and the apparatus of our government, is up for sale.”

It’s hard to believe, but once upon a time there was bipartisan common ground on gun safety, health care, voting rights, climate change, and even limits on campaign funding. The Senate in 2006 voted 98–0 to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act, and George W. Bush signed the law. He also added a voluntary prescription benefit to Medicare, with help from Democrats in both chambers.

Bipartisan Senate pairs introduced major climate bills in 2003 and 2007, but their prospects faded amid opposition from the fossil-fuel industry. In 2010, a few months after Citizens United, a cap-and-trade tax designed to reduce carbon emissions passed the House in a landmark vote, but it fell short in the Senate. Democrats had 59 seats and needed just one Republican vote to advance the bill—and they couldn’t get it.

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When Citizens United turned ten, in 2020, the political money-tracker Open Secrets reported on what the ruling had wrought. Super PACs—the non-party committees created to legally raise cash in unlimited amounts to independently promote issues and candidates—spent $4.5 billion over the decade (up from $750 million over the previous twenty years).

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“The court’s naïve view of our electoral process set the stage for 10 years of billions of dollars corrupting our politics and dictating national policy on everything from the cost of prescription drugs to climate change to gun violence.”

I'm going to disagree with that statement, too. I think the court was anything but naive. It was trying to change America to favor the ultra-rich. I think it understood exactly what it was doing - which was exactly what it wanted to do. And it was the beginning of turning the country into one party rule.

By the time the Supreme Court ruled on Citizens United, it had lost the one justice who had campaigned for office and negotiated political deals: Sandra Day O’Connor.

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The root of [the current] corruption debacle, of course and alas, is Musk spending nearly $300 million to get Trump elected in the first place. Now he’s trying to purchase a state supreme court seat in Wisconsin, and his fellow billionaires are pouring money into state legislative races.

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[Justice O'Connor] likely would have been part of a 5–4 majority against opening the cash floodgates. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about O’Connor’s decision and a couple of portentous what-ifs as we endure this disastrous, potentially deadly, anti-democracy Trump-Musk reign of error and terror.

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What if Bush’s first choice to replace O’Connor, Harriet Miers, had not withdrawn amid critiques that she was not sufficiently experienced or conservative? What if Bush had not then nominated Samuel Alito?

Yes. The rest is history. And so might be the democratic government of the United States.