WaPo: A case that lets billionaires spend big on elections never reached Supreme Court
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By Beth Reinhard
Billionaire Nation is a Washington Post series examining how the wealthiest have amassed unprecedented political power.
Six days after the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, President Barack Obama broke from the norms of polite deference and rebuked the justices sitting before him in the front row during his 2010 State of the Union speech. Over the next 15 years, the left increasingly demonized Citizens United for all that ails American politics.
Last year, as Elon Musk spent $294 million to return Donald Trump to the White House and elect other Republicans, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) repeatedly condemned the “disastrous” ruling. But the intense focus on Citizens United has obscured a less-recognized campaign finance case, one that never made it to the Supreme Court. SpeechNow.org v. FEC actually paved the way for the super PACs frequently used by billionaires like Musk for election-year spending sprees.
While Citizens United abolished the ban on independent expenditures by corporations and unions, SpeechNow went one step further. It erased limits on contributions to political committees that make independent expenditures and don’t give money directly to candidates or parties. These entities took on the catchier name of super PACs. The liberal outcry over that Supreme Court decision drowned out the SpeechNow opinion when it landed just two months later.
And though SpeechNow was also expected to reach the Supreme Court, then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. did not pursue a review of the 2010 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, predicting at the time that it “will affect only a small subset of federally regulated contributions.” He was mistaken. In the 2008 cycle, before super PACs, political nonprofits and other groups spent $140 million on independent expenditures. By 2012, independent expenditures in federal races had reached $1 billion, driven by over $600 million in super PAC spending.
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More: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/12/01/speechnow-fec-citizens-united-super-pacs/
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