Citizens United leads to citizen voters being submerged under piles of cash
Commonplace book
"In January 2010, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts, whose professional career had been spent opposing the 1965 Voting Rights Act, handed down the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision. It ruled that corporations could spend unlimited money in campaign advertising so long as they were not formally working with a candidate or party. Corporations and billionaires promptly formed super PACs, political action committees that were allowed to take funds from `dark money' groups-- non-profits that do not have to disclose their donors. In 2006, dark money made up less than $5 million of spending in federal elections. By 2012 it was more than $300 million.
"Because dark money groups did not have to disclose their donors, it was not clear where that money was coming from."
- Heather Cox Richardson (2023). Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. Viking: 75-76.
Richardson goes on to connect this with a contemporaneously burgeoning internationalization of crime and crime organizations, which operate to manipulate national governments out of fiduciary self-interest.
Furthermore, temporal planning horizons must be extended.
A photo of Justice John Paul Stevens, the author of the dissenting opinion joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor
Photo: Justice Kennedy, the author of the court's opinion in Citizens United and co-perpetrator of Justice Brett Kavanagh by Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States - Anthony Kennedy - The Oyez Project, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14728389