This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 3rd, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Bernie Sanders has surged in the polls and came very close to winning the Iowa

caucuses this week.

And though he claims to hate them, he's been a disproportionate beneficiary of the

Super PAC.

Paul Sherman is a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, he comments.

The New York Times has a really nice story, a really good story, frankly, about how Bernie Sanders is making very disproportionate use if you want to call

it that of outside if you want to call it that, money in the form of super PACs, something he himself

has pledged to completely eliminate.

This is from the story.

No union has spent as much money in the Democratic primary

as National Nurses United, which was born out of a 2009 merger of three smaller

unions and has unapologetically embraced liberal politics and movement building.

In 2011, Union nurses provided health care at the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Lower

Manhattan, and the organization has lobbied forcefully for single-payer health care in a financial transaction tax.

And that they have backed Mr. Sanders as one of their groups.

So what does this say about campaign finance laws, super PACs, and the like?

So there's certainly a number of ironies here.

One of them is that Senator Sanders is an implacable opponent of the Citizens

United decision, but Citizens United actually is what made possible this union's

participation in the election.

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