Major political donors give to dark-money organizations.
Dark-money organizations give their money to super PACS.
Super PACs are required by law to identify their donors.
Their donors, the dark-money organizations, are not required to identify their donors.
Consequently, when super PACs identify their donors to the Federal Election Commission, they'er identifying donors whose donors are unidentifiable.
Such was, and remains, the law's logic as promulgated by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 2010 Citizens United v. F.E.C. decision. A proximate simulacrum of the Justices' deliberations is that of a snake eating its tail, since the majority's ruling was both circular in logic and self-induging. Citizens' most common metaphor has been the opening of big political money's floodgates, though I tend to imagine the yawning of a bottomless abyss.
In my youth's rebellious generation the Supreme Court's most respected Justice was the famously irreverent William O. Douglas, appointed admiringly by FDR and retired under a very delighted Gerald Ford. Their enmity was somewhat akin to LBJ and Robert F. Kennedy's. (Nevertheless, in a political era now galactically distant and unrecognizably foreign, President Ford sent Justice Douglas a note of thanks for his "distinguished years of service ... unequaled in all the history of the Court.")
I mention Douglas because of a line he wrote in one of his many books, a line I've seen misinterpreted by attorneys who should have known better. "It is the one governmental agency that has no ambition," he wrote in We the Judges. But, misunderstanding his words is perhaps understandable. Having been written by an Associate Justice, one would assume he meant the Supreme Court. But he was writing of juries. Ironically, however, what Douglas wrote then about the jury system is indeed more applicable to the Court today: "It is as human as the people who make it up. It is sometimes the victim of passions," continued Douglas.
More applicable, yes, though I suppose only Buddha, Jesus Christ and Donald J, Trump could find it in their hearts to be so charitable. The year 2010 was a dark one for American justice and straight-up poisonous to our politics. The unremitting wreckage the Court inflicted on representative democracy was at first disastrous and by now catastrophic. 2010's Big Money has become 2024's Himalayan Titanic; 99,9% of us are its passengers. while 0.1% are legally licensed to ram us.
If you dropped by this site yesterday then you probably noticed and possibly even read a piece subtitled "How to Blow $100 Million in 7 Days." The post was based on Politico's reporting of an 11th-hour, "record-breaking messaging deluge" by the pro-Kamala Harris super PAC Future Forward. My unfavorable comments on the diluvial messaging are irrelevant to this piece. To be addressed instead is the massive nine-digit dollar amount ... in one week ... the last week. All of which is the thrust of a NY Times report on this kind of gargantuan cash having "become increasingly popular in both parties, particularly for late spending that operatives and donors want to mask."
The spending is masked because a) the super PACs — a bit too obvious here — are using dark money and b) dark contributors wish to stay that way, some because c) their motivations may be even darker and d) if the spending sources ever do come to light, the mountainous cash will be a historical footnote. The Harris-friendly super PAC is nearly a commonplace already; there's no one-way partisanship about these last-minute torrents of high political finance. And at least Future Forward's spending, $10.2 million of which has come from the dark-monied Evidence for Impact, has been in straightforward support of its candidate.
That differs from many other super PACs funded by opaque sources. Pro-Democratic Civic Truth Action has spent $4 million of Evidence for Impact's dark money in support of two third-party presidential candidates who could harm Trump's vote, just as super PAC Voters of These 50 States of America was backed by Evidence for Impact's $2 million. On the Republican side, Badger Values had all of $0 in the bank as of 16 Oct., yet on 18 Oct. its super PAC account grew to $225,000 and then into what the Times calls "a seven-figure campaign" in support of the Green Party's presidential candidate Jill Stein in Wisconsin, hoping to hurt Harris' chances there. My favorite, a Republican super PAC that shelled out $19 million in dark money to associate Trump with the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg because of the nominee's, shall we say, desperately ecumenical opinions on abortion.
This is but a sample of the quadrennial squalor that seems to double every presidential cycle and to which the highest court in the land has consigned this nation. We know who the 0.1% are, we know the super PACs and many behind the dark money, notwithstanding their intended obscurity. We know who wrote the rules that allowed the 50 top donors to inject more than $2.5 billion into this year's elections. And among the top 10 billionaires of the top 50 donors, only two gave to the one party still devoted to actual governing.
It is well we think back to William O. Douglas, to the sanctity of the law and to the respect he had for it. What would he think of the jackanapes of today's Supreme Court? Having heard Justice Douglas' interviews, I believe he'd be amused at how his statement was misunderstood — "It is the one governmental agency that has no ambition" — and even more amused at how the misunderstanding has tortured itself into mockery. But of Citizens United? There his amusement would stop — and he would be stopped in astonishment at its mockery of us all.
Douglas would stop at the Court's PAGE 7: that the law would "insure that the voters are fully informed about who is speaking": at PAGES 51 & 52.: that "there was evidence in the record that independent groups were running election-related advertisements 'while hiding behind dubious and misleading names' — and that barring such deception "would help citizens 'make informed choices in the political marketplace'"; at PAGE 55. that "transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions"; and at PAGE 57: that "civic discourse belongs to the people,"
I know for a fact that William O. Douglas would be shocked at how the Supreme Court has mocked us. I can know this for a fact because if I as a layman can still be shocked in rereading Citizens United v. the F.E.C., then for damn sure a former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court would be.