According to liberal dogma, last year’s Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC was the worst thing to happen to American democracy since Watergate. Hoping to prove that the ruling would allow “unlimited corporate money” to influence elections, Comedy Central star Stephen Colbert announced in March that he would form ColbertPAC, a political action committee. Yesterday, almost three months later, the Federal Election Commission narrowly granted him permission to do so. But that was far from the first obstacle on Colbert’s march to undo the evils of the moneyed class in politics. The first roadblock to Colbert’s efforts to become a “political playa” in the 2012 election came when his lawyer, former FEC Chairman Trevor Potter, told him that his on-air support of federal candidates might count as illegal corporate “in-kind” contributions from Comedy Central’s corporate parent Viacom to ColbertPAC.

Undaunted by this initial restriction on his speech, Colbert then announced he would form the “Colbert Super PAC.” Super PACs raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on independent ads, but cannot give money directly to candidates. That suited Colbert just fine. But Viacom’s lawyers informed him they still felt exposed to legal action since the FEC could count the production costs, airtime and use of Viacom staff to produce the ads as corporate contributions. These contributions wouldn’t be illegal, but Viacom didn’t want to go through the headache of valuing each of Colbert’s ads and then reporting it to the FEC.