The most significant political outcome of the Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court decision 10 years ago on Tuesday is the rise of individual megadonors rather than the unchecked corporate politicking feared by liberals at the time.
“The consensus is that peoples’ big fears about Citizens United opening the door to corporate spending didn’t really materialize, but it did supercharge the ability of megadonors,” said Federal Election Commission member Ellen Weintraub.
“They have become incredibly influential and powerful in the Citizens United era. One billionaire has so much more influence than thousands of voters combined. And that’s not the way the system should work,” said Weintraub, a Democratic appointee to the campaign finance agency.
Almost all the Democratic candidates running for president in 2020 say that Citizens United needs to be reversed.
Conservatives, meanwhile, view the past decade as evidence that Citizens United was a victory for freedom of speech.
“If people want to band together to spend money to influence an election, itâs their First Amendment right to do so, but the Left’s dire predictions about corporate money taking over our elections never transpired,” said Citizens United President David Bossie.
In the decision, the high court ruled in favor of Bossie’s group, a conservative organization that was seeking to distribute and advertise a movie criticizing Hillary Clinton but was prevented from doing so by corporate spending prohibitions.
The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a longstanding prohibition on corporations and unions making independent expenditures, that is, financing election-related communications, violated the First Amendment. The ruling did not strike down limits on direct campaign contributions, which still exist today.
The ruling changed the campaign finance landscape to allow corporations, nonprofit organizations, and labor unions to spend unlimited amounts of money to support or oppose political candidates through their communications. Such spending can help candidates, and there are no funding limits so long as the organizations do not coordinate directly with campaigns.
“The Citizens United decision encourages more participation in Americaâs political process, and that’s a healthy thing,â said Bossie, who was a top aide on Trump’s 2016 campaign is now co-chairman of Trumpâs Maryland campaign team for the 2020 election.
Democrats see Citizens United having led to an unequal increase in political participation, skewed toward those who already have power and privilege.
“Itâs a victory for free speech for billionaires but not a victory for free speech for the rest of us,” said Weintraub.
Political power has shifted from political parties to outside groups that use their own independent expenditure committees, known as super PACs.
Nonparty independent groups spent over $4.5 billion in the past decade, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that gathers data on election spending. Such spending totaled only $750 million over the two decades before.
Furthermore, the wealthiest individual donors, such as Sheldon Adelson, Michael Bloomberg, and George Soros, have become big political players in federal elections, with $1.2 billion spent in the past decade by the top 10 individual donors. The top 10 donors made up 7% of total election-related giving in 2018, up from less than 1% in the previous decade.
Both sides of the aisle disapprove of the change. The latest polling shows that a majority of the public opposes Citizens United. Two-thirds of Republicans favor a constitutional amendment undoing it.
Conservatives, though, argue that the ruling has been beneficial to voters.
âThe question is, what do we get for it? Higher spending in elections has been shown to increase voter knowledge of candidates and issues,â said Bradley Smith, former chairman of the Federal Elections Commission and a conservative campaign finance lawyer.
Voters, though, may not know the provenance of the information they receive, as “dark money” groups, meaning political entities that do not disclose their funding sources, have amassed greater political power, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Dark money groups funnel their funds through nonprofit groups that are not required to disclose their donors. This has led to almost a billion dollars spent by secretive groups in the past decade.
The largest dark money groups that have attempted to influence national politics since Citizens United include pro-business or right-of-center groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Rifle Association, and Americans for Prosperity, a free-market political nonprofit group associated with Charles Koch. There are also some liberal dark money groups, such as the League of Conservation Voters, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the VoteVets Action Fund, and Patriot Majority USA.
“‘Dark money’ has never reached as much as 5% of spending since Citizens United,” said Smith. “Note that there was ‘dark money’ before C.U., too, though less.”
Democrats, however, approach the issue differently.
âI disagree there hasnât been a lot of dark money; a billion dollars isnât a small amount. I donât think it’s an insignificant amount, and all of it goes into the most important and tightly contested races,” said Weintraub.
