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david sirota
'Citizens United 2.0': GOP Pushing a Pair of Supreme Court Cases That Would Further Legalize Bribery
Journalist David Sirota writes that the cases, each firmly backed by the Trump administration, are aimed at "incinerating any remaining deterrents to pay-to-play corruption."
Oct 14, 2025
Fifteen years after the Citizens United ruling opened the gates for corporate money to flow into US elections, the Supreme Court will soon hear another pair of cases that journalist David Sirota says are aimed at "eliminating the last restrictions on campaign donations and obstructing law enforcement’s efforts to halt bribery."
One of the cases, National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Elections Commission (FEC), was launched in 2022 by then-Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance (R-Ohio), now the vice president of the United States, and several other Republicans, who argued that limits on coordinated spending violated the First Amendment.
The limits in question, which were imposed after the Watergate scandal, put a cap on the amount of money that outside donors can spend in direct coordination with their favored candidates.
"Though Citizens United unleashed a 28-fold increase in election spending, the ruling preserved the legality of campaign contribution limits," wrote David Sirota in Rolling Stone on Tuesday. "If those rules are killed off, party committees could become pass-through conduits for big donors to circumvent donation limits and deliver much larger payments in support of lawmakers who can reward them with government favors."
In 2001, the court, then presided over by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, upheld the limits by a margin of 5-4, with Justice David Souter writing in the majority opinion, "there is little evidence" that they "have frustrated the ability of political parties to exercise their First Amendment rights to support their candidates."
This time, Republicans in all three branches of government have seemed to work in tandem to get the law overturned.
In a highly unusual move, the Trump administration's Department of Justice has refused to defend the FEC. And contrary to his job as the federal government's lawyer, Solicitor General John Sauer—who also served as President Donald Trump's lawyer in the case that granted him "presidential immunity" from prosecution last year—has joined the Republican plaintiffs in calling for the Supreme Court to strike down the law.
Without the government to defend the law, the Supreme Court was put in charge of appointing an amicus curiae—"friend of the court"—lawyer to take up the FEC's defense.
The justices chose Roman Martinez, a member of a group run by the right-wing Federalist Society who has spent most of his career working for Republican presidential campaigns and has clerked for conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh and later Chief Justice John Roberts during the time he was deliberating Citizens United. Since 2016, when Martinez went into private practice, he "has led high-profile cases for corporate clients and political lobbying interests," according to The Lever.
The most notable of these was a case last year before the Supreme Court that overturned the Chevron doctrine, which had given government agencies leeway to interpret ambiguous statutes as they saw fit. Martinez, who has described himself as an opponent of "government overreach," called Chevron “a doctrine that puts the thumb on the scale in favor of the government.”
While experts have said they still believe Martinez will take his job seriously, having an outsider defend the coordinated spending limits puts the defense at a structural disadvantage: "It’s very different than when an agency with decades of expertise is defending their own law,” said Tara Malloy of the Campaign Legal Center.
Lever reporters Jared Jacang Maher and Katya Schwenk described the case as a "Citizens United 2.0" that, if successful, would further obliterate limits on campaign spending:
Since 2022, party committees reported $241 million in coordinated spending, compared to over $858 million in "independent" expenditures on individual campaigns. Striking the coordinated-expenditure cap could shift vast sums into direct, mega donor-driven collaborations between parties and candidates.
At the same time, the court is also hearing a case, Sittenfeld v. United States, with wide-ranging implications for the government's ability to prosecute politicians who accept bribes. The case was brought by former Cincinnati City Councilman PG Sittenfeld, who was caught accepting a $20,000 campaign contribution in exchange for supporting a local development project.
Though Sittenfeld is a Democrat, he has already been pardoned by Trump and is challenging his conviction with pro bono representation from the DC law firm Jones Day, which has served as counsel for Trump's campaigns as well as the Republican National Committee and helped defend Trump's cases to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.
"Those circumstances and all that legal firepower make clear that this is less about one shady municipal deal and more about broadening a string of rulings making it increasingly impossible to prosecute public corruption cases," Sirota argued.
The court already narrowed the definition of bribery substantially last year when it ruled that statutes criminalizing overt "quid pro quo" deals between politicians and donors did not ban "gratuities"—gifts of value given to politicians after an act has already been performed. This was notably the exact form of corruption that conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas participated in when they received substantial gifts from billionaire right-wing donors.
"Sittenfeld’s appeal aims to take the Supreme Court’s legal assault on anti-bribery laws even farther," Sirota said. "In legal briefs, his lawyers are offering a novel theory: They insinuate that pay-to-play culture is now so pervasive that it should no longer be considered prosecutable."
One brief even cites Trump himself as a primary example of this endemic corruption: On the campaign trail in 2024, he directly asked oil executives for $1 billion in campaign cash, pledging to do favors for the industry in return. Sittenfeld's lawyers argue that a "prosecutor could doubtless present this meeting alone as at least ambiguous evidence of a quid pro quo" and lament that “politicians are open to prosecution if they say anything during these often informal, unscripted conversations that can be read to even hint at a possible quid pro quo.”
Sirota said these two cases follow the same tactics used during Citizens United, using a small dispute over a technicality to legislate major changes to campaign finance law that could never get through Congress.
"It’s the same dynamic today," he says. "Conservative groups behind today's two new cases undoubtedly hope that their spats over the esoterica of campaign finance and bribery law prompt the even-more-conservative court to not merely mediate these specific conflicts, but to issue broad rulings instead incinerating any remaining deterrents to pay-to-play corruption."
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Alarm Bells Ring as Delaware 'Radically' Shifts More Power to Corporate Insiders
"The Delaware lawmakers that enacted S.B. 21 are lapdogs for corporations and Musk," said one expert at the Open Markets Institute.
Mar 26, 2025
While Democratic Gov. Matt Meyer declared that "Delaware is the best place in the world to incorporate your business, and Senate Bill 21 will help keep it that way," critics reiterated concerns about the corporate-friendly state legislation he signed this week.
The Delaware House of Representatives sent the Senate-approved S.B. 21 to Meyer's desk on Tuesday in a 32-7 vote, with two members absent. The Delaware Business Times reported that the governor "arrived in Dover to sign the measure into law less than two hours after it passed," and "the bill signing was closed to the press."
The bill sailed through the Delaware General Assembly despite anti-monopoly, economic, and legal experts blasting it as a "corporate insider power grab" and accusing state legislators of choosing "billionaire insiders—like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg—over pension funds, retirement savers, and other investors."
Delaware Working Families Party (WFP) political director Karl Stomberg said in a Wednesday statement that "at a time when rank-and-file Democrats across the country are begging their leaders to stand up to" President Donald Trump and Musk, his billionaire adviser, Democratic lawmakers in the state "just gave Musk a $56 billion handout."
That's a reference to Musk's 2018 compensation package for his electric vehicle maker, Tesla, which a Delaware judge ruled against, prompting the richest billionaire on Earth to ditch the state and encourage other business leaders to do the same. Fears of a potential "Dexit" led to lawmakers' frantic effort to pass S.B. 21.
"The Working Families Party has been standing up against this proposed bill for weeks now, and we recognize the need to fight back against corporate overreach in our government," said Stomberg. "WFP electeds proposed serious amendments to address our concerns with the bill that would protect the people of Delaware, but the Democrats chose to side with Musk and vote them down."
"This bill is an indictment of the failed Delaware Way, which continues to allow big corporations and the ultrawealthy like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to enrich themselves at the expense of working people," added Stomberg.
Zuckerberg is the CEO of Meta, Facebook and Instagram's parent company. CNBC recently revealed that "a day after The Wall Street Journal published its story on Meta considering a Delaware departure, Meyer, who was brand new to the job, convened an online meeting with attorneys from law firms that have represented Meta, Musk, Tesla, and others in shareholder disputes in the state, according to public records obtained by CNBC. Other attendees included members of the Delaware Legislature."
"The following day, records show, Meyer invited a second group to meet with him and new Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez. That invitation went to Kate Kelly, Meta's corporate secretary, and to Dan Sachs, the company's senior national director of state and local policy," according to CNBC. "The invite also went to James Honaker, an attorney with Morris Nichols, a firm that's represented Meta in federal court in Delaware, and to William Chandler, former chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery, who is now part of Wilson Sonsini's Delaware litigation practice."
Just weeks after those meetings, the governor urged state lawmakers to swiftly pass S.B. 21. The Lever's Luke Goldstein wrote Wednesday that "the timing of the emails obtained by CNBC reveals clear motivations driving the current law which was rushed before the Legislature last month by the new governor: to let top executives off the hook for legal liabilities."
In earlier reporting, Goldstein highlighted that "Delaware, which has long been perceived as a billionaire playground and corporate tax haven, is the incorporation home to more than 60% of all Fortune 500 companies. That means, if enacted, the wide-ranging regulatory handouts in the bill will have sweeping consequences for corporate behavior across the country."
The Lever's founder, David Sirota, on Wednesday lamented the limited attention the Delaware law is receiving, compared with a major national security breach involving several top Trump officials' unsecure group chat about war plans. As he put it, "Cannot overstate how significant this is—while the national media is focused on the D.C. drama, a group of Democrats off the radar in a tiny state just radically shifted more power to the planet's largest corporations via world-changing legislation."
Daniel Hanley, senior legal analyst at the Open Markets Institute, said Wednesday that "the Delaware lawmakers that enacted S.B. 21 are lapdogs for corporations and Musk. How this one state came to control practically all of American corporate law is a long story, but regardless, Congress can and should take the power away."
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Jayapal, Sanders Offer Answer to Elon Musk's Healthcare Cost Question
"The most efficiently run healthcare systems in the world," said National Nurses United, "have been proven time and time again to be single-payer systems."
Dec 05, 2024
Two of the United States' most outspoken critics of the for-profit health system welcomed billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's criticism of the country's sky-high healthcare spending—and suggested that Musk, a potential Cabinet member in the incoming Trump administration, join the call for Medicare for All.
A social media post by Musk drew the attention of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who reintroduced legislation to expand Medicare coverage to every American last year and have long called for the for-profit healthcare system to be replaced by a government-run program, or single-payer system, like those in every other wealthy country in the world.
"Shouldn't the American people be getting getting their money's worth?" asked Musk, posting a graph from the nonpartisan Peter G. Peterson Foundation that showed how per capita administrative healthcare costs in the U.S. reached $1,055 in 2020—hundreds of dollars more than countries including Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
"Yes," said Sanders, repeating statistics he has frequently shared while condemning the country's $4.5 trillion health system in which private, for-profit health insurance companies increasingly refuse to pay for healthcare services and Americans pay an average of $1,142 in out-of-pocket expenses each year.
"We waste hundreds of billions a year on healthcare administrative expenses that make insurance CEOs and wealthy stockholders incredibly rich while 85 million Americans go uninsured or underinsured," the senator added. "Healthcare is a human right. We need Medicare for All."
Jayapal added that she has "a solution" to exorbitant healthcare costs in the U.S.: "It's called Medicare for All."
Musk has been nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to lead a new federal agency that he wants to create called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Sanders has expressed support for some of the agency's mission, saying its plan to "cut wasteful expenditures" could be put to use at the Department of Defense, which has repeatedly failed audits of its annual spending.
But Sanders has sharply criticized the economic system and business practices that have helped make Musk the richest person in the world, with a net worth of $343.8 billion.
Another progressive, David Sirota of The Lever, suggested last month that DOGE could be used to eliminate the nation's vast health insurance bureaucracy and replace it with Medicare for All, pointing to a 2020 report from the Republican-controlled Congressional Budget Office that showed that a government-run healthcare program would save the country an estimated $650 billion each year.
"Such a system could achieve this in part because Medicare's 2% administrative costs are so much lower than the 17% administrative costs of the bureaucratic, profit-extracting private health insurance industry," wrote Sirota.
Musk drew the attention of Medicare for All advocates amid online discussion about the greed of for-profit insurance giants.
The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Wednesday prompted discussion about widespread anger over the U.S. healthcare system, and following public outcry, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield on Thursday backtracked on a decision to stop paying for surgical anesthesia if a procedure goes beyond a certain time limit. The American Society of Anesthesiologists said that if Anthem stopped fully paying doctors who provide pain management for complicated surgeries, patients would be left paying hundreds or thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs.
National Nurses United, which advocates for a government-run healthcare system, urged Musk and others who support the broadly popular proposal to "join the movement to win Medicare for All."
"The most efficiently run healthcare systems in the world," said the group, "have been proven time and time again to be single-payer systems."
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