The Supreme Court Doesn’t See a Corruption Problem

Another win for wealthy donors.

Last week, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court — which, never forget, was installed by many millions of dollars in political contributions — renewed its commitment to wealthy donors. In NRSC v. FEC, the majority sided with the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), struck down a longstanding prohibition, and ruled that political party committees can fully coordinate with candidates and their campaigns.

In doing so, the Supreme Court eliminated yet another campaign finance guardrail. The Court’s conservative majority has spent years diminishing campaign finance regulations, most notably in its devastating 2010 Citizens United decision that unleashed the catastrophic levels of spending that has wildly corrupted our political system.

This decision is part of a much broader pattern of the Supreme Court enabling political operatives to do more with fewer rules. The limits on party committees spending and coordinating were important, says Tiffany Muller, president of End Citizens United, because “they helped prevent wealthy donors from using party committees as pass-throughs to buy influence with candidates. Put simply, they prevented corruption.”

“So, if you’re Peter Thiel, this is great,” Elie Mystal, justice correspondent at The Nation, paraphrased on WNYC this week. “You’ve always had to keep your boy, your sock puppet, J.D. Vance at an arm’s length to at least keep up the appearances of legality. Now you don’t have to do that.”

The Roberts Court has a habit of framing money in politics questions in terms of freedom of speech. It’s clear how disingenuous those arguments are. As Muller says of the NRSC ruling, “They call it free speech. But free speech belongs to every American. The ability to spend enormous sums of money to influence elections belongs only to the wealthy few.”

There couldn’t be a worse time for the Supreme Court to unleash even more wild political corruption. This decision comes while partisan political groups are increasingly manipulating what’s left of the rules to hide their donors and mislead the public. There’s a growing trend of super PACs forming just after a Federal Election Commission deadline before an election, so that the PAC can spend unlimited amounts of money without having to publicly disclose its donors before voters cast their ballots. According to a Politico analysis, as of mid-June, super PACs that did not have to reveal their donors had already spent $48 million on House and Senate primaries this cycle. By Politico’s count, that’s double the total at this time in the 2024 campaign cycle and a staggering 10 times the amount of undisclosed political spending in 2018.

One of the industries that stands to benefit from more coordination and less transparency is AI, as companies and executives are now major political players capable of spending astronomical sums. OpenAI is valued at $852 billion; Anthropic at $965 billion. According to End Citizens United, as of late June, AI industry companies and employees have contributed $199 million in this election cycle. That includes a staggering $50 million in AI PACs to influence federal elections.

We can only expect to see more ads funded by AI donors. AI PACs have an incredible $102.1 million in cash on hand to spend during the rest of the 2026 campaign cycle. That’s alarming for many reasons, including that so far AI donors have spent dramatically more supporting Republicans than Democrats.

As Sacha Haworth, executive of The Tech Oversight Project, put it, “A handful of powerful companies, like OpenAI, Meta, Google, Palantir, and Andreessen Horowitz, are hellbent on making sure the public is locked out of the halls of Congress and all 50 statehouses.”

Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United and NRSC that favor megadonors have made the too-cozy relationship between industry donors and potential government officials even more explicit. Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her NRSC v. FEC dissent, that “So the Court ushers back in the same opportunities for quid pro quo corruption that the contribution limits were meant to check.”

It’s always dangerous for politicians to feel beholden to titans of industry but given that we’re in a moment of rapid AI expansion and we urgently need tech new regulatory frameworks that protect just about everything, from the climate to labor to child safety, it’s especially dire that industry groups are turning themselves into political megadonors who can buy off would-be regulators.

And, as we know, that’s not the only way that political operatives are exploiting the giant gaps in our campaign finance laws. Republican donors have simultaneously spent huge sums to influence Democratic primaries by funneling money into super PACs that obscure the fact that they’re led by Republicans trying to pick Democrats opponents they assume they’ll have a better chance of defeating in the general election. Stark examples are Lead Left and Real Change, which have received millions from Republican donors and spent heavily on Democratic primaries.

To illustrate the point: American Prosperity Alliance is a self-described pro-free market political organization aligned with former Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. American Prosperity Alliance funded Conservative Americans PAC, which PAC funded Lead Left, another super PAC, which has reportedly spent at least $2.4 million “promoting” Democratic primary candidates.

And yet, ahead of the midterms, while Republican political operatives are engaging in these duplicitous scams and more, the Supreme Court decided to chip away at yet another campaign finance regulation.

Democrats still have a good chance of taking back Congress in November. This term, the Court has shown yet again that when Democrats are back in power they need to hit the ground running with ambitious plans to show the American public that they’re fighting to end all of this rampant corruption.