The Lever

Do you remember where you were, set the scene for us when you get the call, or were you watching?

Was I where?

When the Citizens United decision came down?

What I do remember was I read the opinion on a beach in Florida.

We ended our last episode with Citizens United Attorney James Bopp sitting on a beach,

reading about the Supreme Court's monumental decision in the 2010 case.

If you're a connoisseur of Hollywood heist movies like I am, you're familiar with this part of the story.

The architect of some grand scheme is a thousand miles away with a Mai Tai in his hand

and gets word that his plan was a success.

By the time they figure out what went wrong, we'll be sitting on a beach earning 20%.

With the Citizens United ruling, James Bob had helped pull off what amounts to the caper of the century for the master plan. But unlike Hans Gruber

in Diehard, Bob was not dreaming of walking off into the sunset just yet. As the conservative movement's

major campaign finance lawyer, Bob had helped create the conditions for the big score, but the Supreme

Court had still left the security cameras in place,

those disclosure rules that James Bob hated.

I got the impression that they just were worn out,

and they said, okay, well, we'll just uphold the disclosure.

But that wasn't good enough.

Bob and the conservative movement thought big donors should be allowed to influence and manipulate political discourse while remaining totally anonymous.

I don't want the people who hear my views to have their opinion colored by or affected by who spoke it. In other words, I want those views to be

either accepted or rejected on their merit. That sounds noble enough, until you remember that the

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