John,

On January 21st, 2010, The Supreme Court handed down one of the most damaging decisions in U.S. history: Citizens United v. FEC.

The Citizens United decision opened the floodgates to massive amounts of dark money in our elections—literally $1 billion in the 2020 election alone.

We don't have to settle for a political system where massive donors can drown out the voice of the people. We need to overturn Citizens United and we need to fight for serious money-in-politics reforms.

To say Citizens United has been bad for our democracy would be an understatement. Thanks to this decision, we have super PACs and dark money groups spending anonymous, unlimited amounts of money to influence elections.

In its decision, the Supreme Court reasoned that if it wasn’t explicitly coordinated with a campaign, political spending “do[es] not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption,” because the funds would have little-to-no value to candidates.

I don’t know about you, but billions of dollars in anonymous spending on politics actually *does* make me concerned about corruption. And it makes me very concerned that regular voters' voices could be drowned out by the big money being spent on politics.

To make matters worse, the Federal Election Commission has proven to have little interest in enforcing the money in politics laws that remain intact. Even when a dark money group does violate the law, the FEC usually refuses to act, and anything it does only happens after years of litigation.

John, that hasn’t stopped us from taking on years-long fights against dark money, and we won’t give up anytime soon.

Thanks for your support,

Adam Rappaport
General Counsel
CREW