The Price of Politics

How Citizens United reshaped campaign money, and what the United States can still do about it.

Let's talk campaign money, constitutional power, and civic choices.

Start with the basic question

Here is a question worth sitting with over coffee: when an election costs billions of dollars, who actually has the loudest voice?

Many other democracies place firmer limits on who can give, how much can be spent, and how visible that money must be. That matters because campaign finance is not just about bookkeeping. It shapes who gets heard, who gets access, and whether ordinary people trust that public decisions are being made in the open rather than quietly influenced by whoever can spend the most.

How other democracies handle political money

If you zoom out and compare the United States with other democracies, a pattern becomes hard to ignore. Countries such as France and Canada place tighter limits on who can donate and how much they can give.

The United Kingdom also uses campaign spending caps, which changes the logic of fundraising because there is less advantage in building gigantic war chests. Germany and many Nordic democracies rely more on disclosure rules and public financing, with the broader goal of keeping elections tied to civic participation rather than high-dollar private influence.

The details vary, but the shared premise is consistent: election money is something democracy can regulate in order to protect fairness, transparency, and public trust. [Sources: Elections Canada; International IDEA; Library of Congress]

Why the United States looks different

So why does the U.S. look so different? The short answer is Citizens United v. FEC. The fuller answer is that the ruling landed on top of an older American idea that has been building for decades: spending money to influence elections can count as protected political speech.

In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that the government could not bar corporations and unions from using general treasury funds for independent political expenditures. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion said those restrictions violated the First Amendment. The ruling struck down part of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act and overturned earlier precedents including Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and part of McConnell v. FEC. Put more simply, if spending is legally independent of a candidate, the Court said the government usually cannot ban it just because the speaker is a corporation or union. [Sources: Oyez; Justia; Britannica]

Questioning the premise beneath the ruling

This is where the debate gets deeper than campaign-finance mechanics. The basic premise behind Citizens United is not simply that political speech matters. Almost everyone agrees with that.

The premise is that the identity of the speaker should usually not matter very much. Under that view, a corporation, union, nonprofit, or other association may claim strong First Amendment protection when it speaks about politics.

There is a real argument for that view. American law has long recognized associational rights, especially when people band together to advance ideas, as in cases protecting groups such as the NAACP from state interference. And the Court has also said, in cases such as First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, that speech on public issues does not lose protection simply because its source is a corporation.

But this is also where many people, including many legal scholars, part company with the ruling. A corporation is not a citizen with a conscience, a vote, or a mortal stake in public life. It is a state-created entity with special legal advantages, often including perpetual life, limited liability, and access to vast pooled capital.

A union is different from a business corporation because it is an association of workers with its own democratic structure. But it is still not identical to an individual speaker. So the real question is whether all organized groups should receive the same level of protection as individual human beings in elections, or whether democracy is allowed to notice the difference between a person speaking and an institution spending at scale. [Sources: Oyez on Bellotti; Oyez on NAACP v. Alabama; Move to Amend summary]

A vivid way to think about the difference is this. Imagine a handful of neighbors meeting in a church basement to oppose a polluting plant in their town. They print flyers, pool small donations, and speak together because none of them could be heard alone. That is associational freedom in a very human sense. Now imagine a multinational corporation with layers of subsidiaries, perpetual life, sophisticated ad buyers, and the ability to spend tens of millions of dollars on targeted messages across states it does business in. Both are legally “groups,” but they do not enter public debate with anything like the same power. That does not mean the first group deserves rights and the second deserves none. It does mean democracy may have a legitimate reason to notice the difference between people joining together to be heard and institutions using concentrated capital to dominate the conversation.

Where the case came from

Where did the case come from, and who pushed it? The case was brought by Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit advocacy organization that wanted to distribute Hillary: The Movie, a documentary critical of then-Senator Hillary Clinton during the 2008 Democratic primary season.

The group planned to make the film available through video-on-demand and promote it with ads close to the primary elections. Federal law at the time, specifically Section 203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, often called McCain-Feingold, restricted corporations and unions from paying for certain electioneering communications close to elections using their general treasury funds. Citizens United challenged those restrictions in court. The case was also backed by a broader deregulatory legal movement that argued campaign-finance law too often lets government decide who may speak, when, and with what resources. Critics saw the same laws as guardrails against corruption and unequal influence. That clash is the real fault line underneath the case. [Sources: Oyez; Britannica; History]

What happened next, and why super PACs exploded

One important civic footnote: Citizens United did not, by itself, create super PACs. That came a few months later, when the D.C. Circuit decided SpeechNow.org v. FEC. In that case, the court said that if a group makes only independent expenditures and does not coordinate with candidates, then limits on contributions to that group are unconstitutional. That is the legal opening that produced modern super PACs, outside groups that can raise unlimited sums to spend on elections so long as they are formally independent. [Sources: FEC; Campaign Legal Center]

And the scale is no longer hypothetical. OpenSecrets lists the inflation-adjusted total cost of the 2024 federal election cycle at about $14.8 billion, while pre-election projections during the cycle put the total closer to $15.9 billion in nominal dollars. However you slice it, the point is the same: American elections now operate in a financial universe that would look extraordinary to most democracies. [Source: OpenSecrets]

What can still change

How big money distorts the information environment

One of the most troubling parts of the current system is how easily large sums of political money can spread claims that are misleading, stripped of context, or flatly false. The accountability rules are surprisingly weak.

The Federal Communications Commission says it generally does not review or pre-approve political ads and does not ensure the accuracy of statements made by candidates or issue advertisers. In practice, that means voters often see emotionally powerful messages long before they see any correction.

FactCheck.org’s 2024 ad archive documented multiple examples, including a Trump campaign ad that used a New York Times quote about Kamala Harris on taxes in a misleading way by cutting off the part that specified the increases were aimed at wealthy Americans and large corporations. It also flagged another ad attacking Harris on California’s enforcement of Jessica’s Law as a distortion.

PolitiFact’s ad-watch archive shows a steady stream of ads from campaigns and outside groups rated false or mostly false across multiple cycles. The deeper problem is not only that some ads mislead. It is that the people funding them can spend enormous amounts to repeat those messages at scale, often in ways ordinary voters cannot match with time, money, or reach. [Sources: FCC; FactCheck.org; PolitiFact]

So what could still be changed, even without pretending Citizens United never happened? More than people sometimes assume. The challenge is that every reform path runs into a different kind of wall, from constitutional doctrine to congressional gridlock to weak enforcement.

What reform could look like

Creative alternatives around media fairness: If big money can buy repetition, saturation, and emotional force, one obvious democratic question is whether the public should get more than one side of the story in the same media environment.

That instinct is understandable, but it is important to be precise about what is actually possible. The old Fairness Doctrine is not simply waiting on a shelf to be restored. It applied to licensed broadcasters in an earlier media era, and the FCC formally removed it after concluding it could chill speech rather than expand it.

Courts today would also closely scrutinize any attempt to force viewpoint balancing, especially where the government is telling speakers or publishers what opposing views they must carry. So the real question is not whether we can turn the clock back. It is whether we can design modern rules that improve civic fairness without handing government too much control over content. [Sources: FCC 2011 fairness-doctrine order; FCC political programming materials]

That is where the broadcast-versus-online distinction matters. Broadcast radio and television stations use public airwaves under federal licenses, which is why the law has historically imposed some public-interest duties on them, including a narrow equal-opportunities rule for legally qualified candidates.

Online platforms are different. They are private publishers or intermediaries with their own First Amendment interests, which makes broad “equal discourse” mandates much harder to defend.

But narrower reforms are still on the table: stronger public ad archives for broadcast and digital ads, standardized sponsor identification, clearer disclaimers on microtargeted political ads, labels for AI-generated content, rapid visibility for factual corrections, and public-interest obligations for broadcasters that encourage debate formats exposing audiences to competing views.

None of that would create perfect balance, and none of it would solve misinformation by itself. But it could make the information environment less one-way and less dependent on who can afford to repeat a message the longest. [Sources: FCC fact sheet; 47 U.S.C. § 315; Honest Ads Act summaries]

Stronger disclosure: The DISCLOSE Act has been repeatedly introduced in Congress and, in its 2026 form, would require covered organizations spending more than $10,000 in an election cycle to report that spending rapidly and disclose additional donor information, while also tightening rules around foreign money and digital political advertising. Disclosure is not the same as a spending cap, but it is one of the clearest reforms still available under current doctrine. [Source: GovTrack summary of S. 3991]

Small-dollar public financing: Matching systems can amplify ordinary donors without banning anyone from speaking. The core idea is to make a $25 or $50 donation politically meaningful enough that candidates spend more time listening to constituents and less time dialing for large checks. Other democracies use public funding much more broadly; the U.S. could expand that approach without waiting for a constitutional amendment.

Revisiting super PAC doctrine: Because super PACs were enabled by SpeechNow.org v. FEC, not solely by Citizens United, one live debate is whether courts could revisit the assumption that unlimited contributions to supposedly independent groups pose no corruption risk. Legally, that would still be difficult. Civically, it matters because many Americans hear “Citizens United” as shorthand for the entire outside-money system, when the real architecture is a chain of cases.

Constitutional amendment: The most sweeping option is still an amendment. The Democracy for All Amendment was reintroduced in the Senate in 2025 and introduced in the House later that year. Its purpose is to restore the power of Congress and the states to set reasonable limits on campaign spending and financing rules that current doctrine often forbids. But it is also the steepest climb. Amending the Constitution requires two-thirds support in both chambers of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states, which is a very high bar in a polarized era. It also faces principled opposition from libertarian and deregulatory free-speech advocates who argue that broader government power over political spending could invite censorship, incumbent protection, or viewpoint discrimination. Some reformers on the left support an amendment but argue this version does not go far enough. So the obstacle is not only partisan resistance. It is also disagreement over what a durable fix should look like. [Sources: Senate Judiciary Committee press release; Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon press release; Move to Amend]

What feels most useful to me, civically, is resisting the urge to turn this issue into a cartoon. Citizens United was not a random thunderbolt, and campaign-finance reform is not a magic wand.

The case grew out of a real constitutional argument about political advocacy, speaker identity, and the role of government in elections. But it also helped cement a system in which billionaires, corporations, unions, and opaque outside groups can wield extraordinary influence over democratic life. Other democracies have made different choices. The United States could make different choices too. So the real question is not whether reform is imaginable. It is whether we still believe democracy should give ordinary people a meaningful voice, even when that means telling concentrated wealth that influence has limits. If the answer is yes, then this debate is not just about campaign finance. It is about what kind of republic we want to be.

Sources

·         Supreme Court and case background: Oyez, Justia, Britannica, and materials on Citizens United v. FEC, First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, and NAACP v. Alabama

·         Campaign finance law and reform: Federal Election Commission, Campaign Legal Center, GovTrack, and congressional materials on the Democracy for All Amendment

·         Political advertising and media rules: Federal Communications Commission materials, 47 U.S.C. § 315, and summaries of the Honest Ads Act

·         Fact-checking and election spending: OpenSecrets, FactCheck.org, and PolitiFact

·         Comparative democracy and political finance: Elections Canada, International IDEA, and the Library of Congress

·         Advocacy perspectives discussed in the piece: Move to Amend

Questions to sit with

When you hear the phrase free speech in this debate, what do you picture: a person speaking their mind, or a system where the deepest pockets can afford to be heard the most? Should a corporation, union, or advocacy group be treated the same as an individual person for First Amendment purposes in elections, or does that flatten important differences in power? When you see a polished political ad, do you assume someone has checked whether it is true, or have you already learned not to? And if you could change one thing about this system, what would it be, and what tradeoff would you accept to get it?

I would love to hear your comments and suggestions at hello@cletustaylor.com. And if this conversation matters to you, I invite you to join me again next week as we keep thinking carefully about truth, citizenship, and the choices in front of us. I am also glad to share that A Student of Truth, the first book in the Finding Truth series, is now in final review and should be available for download and in physical media within the next week or so.