Can’t solve foreign influence.

From the moment the 2010 Supreme Court ruling Citizens United v. FEC came down, it scandalized liberals. The decision heralded the “hostile corporate takeover of our democratic process,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) thundered at the time.

In 2017, a commissioner of the Federal Election Commission resigned, claiming “since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, our political campaigns have been awash in unlimited, often dark money.”* This was the animating sentiment of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign for president; he even went so far as to claim that billionaires are simply “buying elections.”

This idea has given rise to a new liberal battle cry: Repeal Citizens United! Unfortunately, that tactic is naive and misguided, and relies on a misunderstanding of the law and politics surrounding the case. As we approach the 2018 congressional elections — and beyond that, the crucial presidential election of 2020 — it is more vital than ever to have a clear view of where this ruling fits into the mosaic of campaign finance law.

Such understanding will, in turn, shine light on what can be done to make the election process fairer and make politicians more responsive to all their constituents, not just the big spenders.

Some cities and states are already experimenting with programs that strengthen the voices of ordinary voters. Building on such efforts is likely to have far greater effects than continuing to demonize Citizens, whose logic is defensible on First Amendment grounds.

Most widespread in liberal circles is the idea that Citizens opened the floodgates to massive amounts of corporate spending in politics. But as many legal scholars have argued, the floodgates were already open. Citizens is not responsible for the massive amounts of money showered on favored candidates. Nor is it responsible for the rise of so-called dark money in politics.

Citizens didn’t upend our campaign finance system. It was a logical next step, given past court decisions.

Let’s put the hated decision into context. The inundation of elections with private cash is not the result of Citizens but rather was facilitated by the 1976 decision Buckley v. Valeo. That case established the legal framework sanctioning billions of dollars of independent private campaign spending. In it, the Court ruled that limits on campaign donations — direct donations to candidates — are constitutional but said it was unconstitutional to limit non-donation expenditures, such as independently funded advertisements.

Such independent spending — which cannot be coordinated with candidates, according to the Court — was protected under the First Amendment as not just speech but political speech. The idea is that money is a necessary instrument for supporting a political candidate, whether it’s paying for yard signs or taking out an ad in the newspaper.

Not unreasonably, the Court ruled that limitations on independent expenditures would constitute limitations on one’s ability to support a candidate through any number of media. Placing a dollar limit on such expenditures would arbitrarily prevent certain kinds of campaign support simply by the fact of how expensive they are.