What The Hell America!

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN a greedy geezer with the most powerful job in the world cements himself to a greedy grabber who is the richest man in the world? You get Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and a superpower emeritus about ready to be stripped for parts.

Few foresaw this in 2010, when the Supreme Court launched us onto a dark path. The court’s 5–4 Citizens United decision, allowing unlimited corporate, interest-group, and individual spending on elections, did trigger dire predictions from plenty of doomsayers. But even the most pessimistic among them fell short of imagining American reality today.

“We knew that it was going to be really, really destructive for our democracy,” says Tiffany Muller, president of the group End Citizens United, which is dedicated to electing Democrats committed to seeing the ruling overturned. “Fifteen years after that decision, we’re seeing the full culmination of living under a Citizens United world—where it’s not just elections that are for sale, but it’s that our entire government, and the apparatus of our government, is up for sale.”

It’s hard to believe, but once upon a time there was bipartisan common ground on gun safety, health care, voting rights, climate change, and even limits on campaign funding. The Senate in 2006 voted 98–0 to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act, and George W. Bush signed the law. He also added a voluntary prescription benefit to Medicare, with help from Democrats in both chambers.

Bipartisan Senate pairs introduced major climate bills in 2003 and 2007, but their prospects faded amid opposition from the fossil-fuel industry. In 2010, a few months after Citizens United, a cap-and-trade tax designed to reduce carbon emissions passed the House in a landmark vote, but it fell short in the Senate. Democrats had 59 seats and needed just one Republican vote to advance the bill—and they couldn’t get it.

The oil and gas sector now floods the election zone with over six times as much cash as it spent in the 2010 cycle. And it has amassed all the clout you’d expect as contributions have skyrocketed—from defeating a carbon tax–friendly House Republican in 2010 to helping to elect Trump last year.

When Citizens United turned ten, in 2020, the political money-tracker Open Secrets reported on what the ruling had wrought. Super PACs—the non-party committees created to legally raise cash in unlimited amounts to independently promote issues and candidates—spent $4.5 billion over the decade (up from $750 million over the previous twenty years).

The major players of the new era, it turned out, were not corporations. They were millionaires and billionaires. “The 10 most generous donors and their spouses injected $1.2 billion into federal elections over the last decade,” Open Secrets found.

Muller wrote then that a new Gilded Age was upon us, one in which wealthy donors—most of them old, white, and male—unleashed their money to manipulate politicians, reward them if they were compliant, and sink them if they were not. “The court’s naïve view of our electoral process set the stage for 10 years of billions of dollars corrupting our politics and dictating national policy on everything from the cost of prescription drugs to climate change to gun violence,” she said in a 2020 USA Today op-ed.

THE CORRUPTION OF FIVE YEARS AGO is almost trivial compared with the corruption of today. Gridlock and dysfunction are still with us, blocking many priorities supported by voters, but now “there is nothing that isn’t for sale,” Muller told me, and reeled off a few choice outrages: Trump’s personal investment in crypto and public steps that will enrich him, his family, and wealthy friends; an unprecedented thirteen billionaires in Trump’s cabinet, with all the potential that entails for conflicts of interest and insulation from the impact of their policies; and Musk’s “unfettered access” to the government and the private data of tens of millions, as he fires, freezes, and cancels his way through one agency after another, allegedly to slash costs.

At the same time, Musk himself is flush with government grants and contracts, and is aggressively pursuing more of them—from the Federal Aviation Administration (where he has insinuated his Starlink internet system into its operations although the FAA’s existing Verizon contract doesn’t expire until 2038) to the Commerce Department’s $42 billion rural broadband access program (which rewrote its rules last week to make Starlink eligible).

The root of this corruption debacle, of course and alas, is Musk spending nearly $300 million to get Trump elected in the first place. Now he’s trying to purchase a state supreme court seat in Wisconsin, and his fellow billionaires are pouring money into state legislative races in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. What’s next, local school boards?

By the time the Supreme Court ruled on Citizens United, it had lost the one justice who had campaigned for office and negotiated political deals: Sandra Day O’Connor, a former Arizona state senator and Republican majority leader, nominated by Ronald Reagan in 1981 as the first woman on the court.

It would be an understatement to say O’Connor’s decision to step down in January 2006 to care for her husband, who had Alzheimer’s, had enormous national consequences. One of them was Citizens United. A few days after that ruling, speaking at Georgetown University, O’Connor joked that “Gosh, I step away for a couple of years, and there’s no telling what’s going to happen.”

I wrote in 2010 that based on that remark and her 2003 opinion upholding campaign donation and spending limits in the McCain–Feingold law, she likely would have been part of a 5–4 majority against opening the cash floodgates. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about O’Connor’s decision and a couple of portentous what-ifs as we endure this disastrous, potentially deadly, anti-democracy Trump-Musk reign of error and terror.

Two of those what-ifs: What if Bush’s first choice to replace O’Connor, Harriet Miers, had not withdrawn amid critiques that she was not sufficiently experienced or conservative? What if Bush had not then nominated Samuel Alito?

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AND THE DEEPEST WHAT-IF QUESTION OF ALL: What if O’Connor had left the Court in 2016 instead of in 2006? Her biographer, Evan Thomas, told NPR’s Nina Totenberg in 2019 that she resigned because “he sacrificed for me, now it’s my turn”—a reference to her husband moving from Phoenix to Washington for her career. “It was tragic because within six months of her leaving the Court, he could barely recognize her,” Thomas said.

The rest of the interview went like this:

TOTENBERG: Did she regret it—leaving?

THOMAS: She said it’s the biggest mistake—dumbest thing I ever did.

TOTENBERG: Indeed, in the years afterwards, she made little secret of her view that the Court, with the addition of Justice Samuel Alito in her place, was systematically dismantling her legacy.

That legacy would have been much different, and maybe more permanent, had she stayed even a few years longer. Just as her political background made her unusual, so did her gender. As I wrote in 2010, “She was a law school graduate who had been offered secretarial jobs. She was a justice who, after listening to her new colleague Antonin Scalia rail against affirmative action, responded: ‘How do you think I got my job?’”

Short of a Supreme Court reversal of Citizens United, lawmakers have repeatedly introduced House and Senate bills proposing a constitutional amendment to overturn it. But that’s a long and arduous route that has yet to get traction. In the meantime, states have made progress on reforms such as disclosure of major donors and closing dark money loopholes, and there are ways for Congress to reduce the influence of money in politics.

The House passed such a bill—the For the People Act—five times, according to Muller, but Senate filibuster holdouts made it impossible to pass with a simple 51-vote majority. The next chance to enact a law like that would be January 2029, the next time there might be a Democratic House, Senate, and president.

Here’s Muller’s checklist of work to be done between now and then: call out corruption and harm, hold the perpetrators accountable, and make sure voters know who they are; win the House in 2026 to check Trump; win as many state races as possible next year for governor, secretary of state, and attorney general—the jobs crucial to running and protecting elections for president and Congress in 2028. Then it might be possible to ride a blue wave to a blue sweep.

It’s not unthinkable. By that point, Trump, Musk, and their billionaires-first, empathy-last philosophy will have inflicted untold pain. There’s a good chance voters will be anxious to leave them, and it, behind.

And yet, the demise of our democracy is not unthinkable, either. Will the 2028 election be free and fair? Will the voice of the people be heard?

The presence of Justice O’Connor on the Supreme Court for another five or ten years likely would have changed a chunk of the Court’s major 5–4 rulings, and the direction of the country. I once counted four cases with that potential in 2007 alone. Given the frightening territory we’re in, I now see Citizens United as the most ominous result of her absence—even, possibly, the most consequential hinge point of U.S. history in my lifetime. Because no one knows how this ends.