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Today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the latest Republican-backed effort to obliterate what’s left of our campaign finance rules. The case, National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission [ [link removed] ], sets up the possibility that the justices will gut limits on coordinated spending between political parties and candidates. Legal and political experts have raised the possibility that this case is “the next Citizens United” because it could upend how campaigns are run by allowing yet more unconstrained money to course through the political system.
There’s no better time to watch Project 2029: A Reimagining [ [link removed] ], a new documentary series hosted by journalist Molly Jong-Fast and available to stream [ [link removed] ]. Living inside this news cycle, it’s difficult to think beyond the end of the week, let alone to another era when Democrats have power and begin to repair everything that’s been broken during this administration. The series plots a course Democrats can take to turn the country around when they have the opportunity. In the series, Jong-Fast argues that “Democrats need to be more than anti-Trump” and presents ways they can regain public trust and fulfill a pro-active vision.
The first episode, Project 2029: Campaign Finance Reform Comes First [ [link removed] ] (which was just released), lays out why campaign finance reform must be, as the title says, the very first step to addressing myriad other problems. Jong-Fast opens the series by explaining, “The first step to getting American politics back to normal, or perhaps, better than normal. Campaign finance reform is critical to rooting out corruption and crony capitalism as well as getting our politicians to focus on the will of the voters and not the will of the billionaires.” The episode features campaign finance reform experts such as Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig, President of End Citizens United Tiffany Muller, President and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice Michael Waldman, and Senior Fellow at Center for American Progress Tom Moore. And it’s absolutely worth the watch.
In the first episode, Muller sets the table and describes how the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision brought us to this place where billionaires are dumping money into our elections:
“Essentially, [Citizens United] took two really bad ideas, and it merged them together. It said that money equals speech, and corporations are people. And, really, what it allowed was this unlimited and, in a lot of cases undisclosed, money to start flooding into our election cycle.
What we’ve seen in the 15 years since that decision is a real shift in power in Washington, away from voters, away from accountability to voters, and more toward accountability to those who write the biggest checks, and the special interests. That’s had a really devastating impact on our politics and our policy outcomes. We can see that in everyday life, whether we’re talking about energy prices or prescription drug prices or gun safety. It has meant real gridlock and dysfunction in the last 15 years.”
The Citizens United decision was a long time coming. The documentary tracks the progression of federal courts and the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts whittling away at protections against big money flooding the political system. As Waldman of the Brennan Center tells Jong-Fast, the Supreme Court justices who decided the Citizens United case may not have anticipated the obscene amounts of money dumped into elections, but Roberts had spent much of his career working toward deregulating campaign finance. As Waldman explains, “Could [the justices] have imagined that one person, the world’s wealthiest man, would effectively pay for the winning presidential campaign and then move into the White House on a cot and be given prime ministerial authority to wreck the government for a few months? I don’t know that they thought about that, but I don’t know that it bothered them that much, either.”
Today, as the Supreme Court justices listened to arguments about campaign spending coordination, which might have sounded like technical or bureaucratic minutia, it’s important to keep in mind a point that Lessig makes when describing why he changed the direction of his work and made campaign finance the center of his research: “[Campaign finance] is not the most important issue, it’s the first issue. If we don’t solve this issue, we don’t solve anything else.”
As Muller says in the documentary, the American people get that: Roughly 80% of Americans think the system is broken. That makes it all the more disturbing that the conservative majority of the Supreme Court, installed by rich donors, seems poised to allow even more money to move between political groups. It’s very easy to become fatalistic about where we’re headed. Project 2029: Campaign Finance Reform Comes First [ [link removed] ] also runs through possible avenues for reform, both in Congress and in the states. One measure out of Montana could be replicated in at least 23 states across the country, the campaign finance experts interviewed say, and they walk viewers through ways to get involved. So, if SCOTUS had you on edge today, you can find some ideas for ways forward with Project 2029 [ [link removed] ].

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