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'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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Trans Plaintiffs Call On Supreme Court to Reject Trump's 'Discriminatory' Passport Restrictions
"The administration’s attempts to deny that right to transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people has no basis in law or policy," said one lawyer.
Oct 06, 2025
A group of transgender plaintiffs is calling on the US Supreme Court to reject the Trump administration's request to lift a judge's order blocking what they describe as a "discriminatory" passport policy.
The US State Department earlier this year announced that it would bar transgender Americans from changing the gender listed on their passports from the gender assigned to them at birth. Several transgender plaintiffs, represented by attorneys from the ACLU, quickly filed for an injunction against the policy, which was granted by a lower court and upheld by the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals.
In asking the Supreme Court to reject the Trump administration's request for a stay, the ACLU attorneys argue that the passport policy "irrationally undermines the very purpose of passports—identifying a US citizen when they travel" and also is "motivated by antitransgender animus."
The ACLU attorneys are asking for the injunction to be upheld so that transgender and nonbinary Americans can continue to either change the designated gender on their passports or receive a passport with a gender marked as "X."
Jessie Rossman, legal director at the ACLU of Massachusetts, said that the injunction should be upheld because the administration's policy would "cause immediate, irreparable harm" if it came into effect.
"Transgender, nonbinary, and intersex Americans rely on accurate identity documents to travel with safety, privacy, and dignity," Rossman said. "We are asking the Supreme Court to reject this request for a stay and preserve the injunction issued below so our clients will be spared profound disruption and distress while their case proceeds."
Li Nowlin-Sohl, staff attorney for the ACLU’s LGBTQ and HIV Project, urged the Supreme Court to follow the lead of the lower courts, which "made abundantly clear how discriminatory and baseless the State Department's new policy is and the harm it poses for hundreds of thousands of people like our clients."
"People across the country depend on identity documents that accurately reflect their identity—who they are in their workplaces, their schools, and their communities," Nowlin-Sohl emphasized. "The administration’s attempts to deny that right to transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people has no basis in law or policy, and we’ll continue to fight this policy until it is permanently defeated."
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Help Protect Federal Workers From Trump's Union-Busting Attacks
Only months after courting union voters with pro-worker campaign rhetoric, President Trump is on track to become the most anti-union president in modern American history.
Oct 05, 2025
During a 2024 campaign stop in Detroit, President Donald Trump energized the crowd by proclaiming: “I will protect what is ours. I will protect our workers. I will protect our jobs.” Then, asking the audience to look around at empty buildings and remember how they’ve been ripped off, Trump continued, “These pro-worker policies are among the many reasons I’ve been overwhelmingly endorsed by the rank-and-file membership of the Teamsters.”
Only months after courting union voters with pro-worker campaign rhetoric, President Trump is on track to become the most anti-union president in modern American history.
The President’s record is clear: Trump’s first Supreme Court appointee, Neil Gorsuch, cast the deciding vote in Janus v AFSCME, a “right-to-work” ruling Trump praised for allowing workers to opt out of union dues while freeriding off the benefits of collective bargaining provided by dues-paying members. The president’s two labor secretaries, Eugene Scalia and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, have vigorously peeled away protective regulations for workers. And following the unprecedented firing without cause of Gwen Wilcox, a member of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that addresses unfair labor practices and safeguards workers’ rights remains paralyzed by its inability to reach a quorum.
But what sets President Trump apart is his targeting of public sector unions.
In early April, Representatives Jared Golden (D-Maine) and Ryan Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) introduced bipartisan legislation, “The Protect America’s Workforce Act” (H.R. 2250), to overturn Trump’s executive order and restore all terminated collective bargaining agreements.
During his first term, President Trump issued executive orders targeting federal employee unions, aimed at “weakening their ability to bargain contracts and curtailing the amount of time union representatives can spend helping members with their complaints,” according to Andrea Hsu of NPR’s "Morning Edition." Union officials complained that their ability to file grievances was almost nonexistent.
The president then kicked off his second term with an anti-union executive order, called “Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce,” that allows the reclassification of as many as 10,000 workers, making them at-will employees and stripping union protections. But to this point, no traditional “Schedule F” employees have been reclassified.
Perhaps that’s because President Trump has found an easier path to union busting.
In March, the President cited national security concerns as he directed 22 federal agencies to disregard collective bargaining contracts covering 950,000 federal employees. In late August, he signed a second order “stripping union rights” from 440,000 “employees at six additional agencies,” according to the New York Times. These employees represent the overwhelming majority of unionized federal workers.
Public sector unions have been a bulwark against declining labor power over the past half-century. While private sector unionization has withered to 5.9% (from 35% in the 1950s), unions still represent 32.2% of public employees, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report. But in only a few months, President Trump has removed union protections from more than a million federal workers, representing over 15% of the 7 million public-sector union members nationwide.
If the president’s moves survive legal challenges, he will be the single biggest union buster in American history, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute.
But there is hope.
In early April, Representatives Jared Golden (D-Maine) and Ryan Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) introduced bipartisan legislation, “The Protect America’s Workforce Act” (H.R. 2250), to overturn Trump’s executive order and restore all terminated collective bargaining agreements. A companion bill that includes a repeal of the most recent executive order has since been introduced in the Senate.
The bill’s authors need 218 signatures to force a vote against the will of House leadership. As of September 17, it has 216 signatures, including 213 Democrats and 3 Republicans, according to the American Federation of Government Employees.
If passed in the House and Senate, the bill becomes law and overrides Trump’s union-busting executive orders, even if the courts uphold them. The president could then sign the bill into law or veto it and send the legislation back to Congress where an override requires a two-thirds majority in each chamber.
In either case, it remains possible to protect the collective bargaining rights of federal employees. So, call your representatives. Flood their inboxes. Let them know that we intend to stand up for our federal civil servants.
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