Profits From Ignorance: The Campaign Finance Case That Went Unnoticed

During the 2024 election cycle, Elon Musk reportedly spent over $277 million supporting Donald Trump and his affiliates through “America PAC,” a Super PAC founded by Musk himself. Following Trump’s election, Musk was appointed as senior adviser to the president and became heavily involved in the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative.

While no evidence of a quid pro quo arrangement has emerged, many Americans beg the question: Where does political support end and political access begin?

Campaign Finance 101: Why Do We Need It and What Does It Provide?

Every election cycle, Americans are flooded with political advertisements funded by organizations most voters have never even heard of. These groups spend billions of dollars to support and oppose candidates while remaining legally independent from the campaigns and their respective audiences. Yet this modern system of unlimited independent political spending was not inevitable.

The post-Watergate campaign finance system was specifically designed to reduce corruption and restore public trust in elections by limiting the amount of money driving politics. Lawmakers, regulators, courts, and much of the public largely accepted this framework for decades. But by 2010, the constitutional understanding of corruption and political speech had dramatically shifted.

The roots of this shift can be traced to the post-Watergate scandal and its consequential reforms in the 1970s. Congress enacted the long anticipated campaign finance reforms that were sought since the early 1900s through the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) of 1971, which was substantially strengthened following the Watergate scandal in 1974.

The amendments imposed contribution limits, expanded disclosure requirements, and created the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to enforce federal campaign finance laws. The policy rationale was straightforward: large political contributions could create corruption or the appearance of corruption and, for this reason, should be constitutionally regulated in order to preserve public confidence.

The Supreme Court challenged this ruling of Buckley v. Valeo (1976), establishing the now foundational distinction between direct contributions to candidates and independent expenditures. Contributions consist of money given directly to candidates or campaigns, whereas independent expenditures occur when an individual or organization spends money advocating for or against a candidate without coordinating with the candidate or campaign itself.

The Court ruled that direct contributions to candidates could be limited because they create corruption risks and may lead to bribery, favoritism, unequal political access, and declining public trust. This became known as the Court’s “anti-corruption interest.” At the same time, however, the Court held that restrictions on independent expenditures violated the First Amendment because political spending constituted a form of protected political speech.

Although Buckley preserved contribution limits, it simultaneously introduced a constitutional distinction that would increasingly narrow the government’s ability to regulate campaign finance. The Court reasoned that independent expenditures posed a reduced risk of corruption because they lacked direct coordination with candidates.

Over the following decades, courts increasingly embraced and expanded this logic. In Citizens United v. FEC (2010), SCOTUS strengthened this doctrine by holding that independent expenditures made by corporations and unions could not be restricted because they did not give rise to quid pro quo corruption.

Citizens United represents more than a continuation of Buckley; it reflects a doctrinal shift. In Buckley, independent expenditures were viewed as carrying a reduced risk of corruption, whereas Citizens United treated them as constitutionally incapable of corrupting candidates altogether so long as they remained legally independent.

This immediately raised a new constitutional question: if independent expenditures could not corrupt candidates, then could contributions to organizations making exclusively independent expenditures be limited at all? The DC Circuit Court answered that question only months later in SpeechNow.org v. FEC.

The Dramatic Shift: Unlimited Expenditures

Courts rarely decide cases in isolation. Rather, judges operate within a “protocol” of precedent in which earlier decisions and relevant rationale shape the outcome of future disputes. Lower courts are expected to apply the rulings of superior courts, while SCOTUS retains the ultimate discretionary authority to review constitutional controversies through the certiorari process.

Given this judicial structure, one might reasonably expect that a significant transformation would originate from Congress, a constitutional amendment, or a direct ruling of SCOTUS itself. Instead, the modern Super PAC system emerged primarily from a lower court decision that SCOTUS declined to review.

SpeechNow.org is a political action committee that raises money exclusively for independent expenditures and does not contribute directly to candidates. Applying the logic of Citizens United to Speechnow.org vs. FEC, the court concluded that contributions to groups engaging solely in independent expenditures could not corrupt candidates either. As a result, federal contribution limits applied to such organizations were struck down.

The DC Circuit’s reasoning in SpeechNow attempted to follow a syllogistic structure. This is when an argument is concluded through the following deduction: If A, then B; if B, then C; therefore, if A, then C. If independent expenditures cannot be limited under Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (A), and contributions used only for independent expenditures function the same way (B), then limits on contributions to groups making only independent expenditures must also be unconstitutional (C). But this conclusion requires extending the logic of Citizens United, not simply applying its holding, effectively treating an implication as binding constitutional law.

This extension is judicially significant because SpeechNow arguably moved beyond the precise holding of Citizens United and applied its broader reasoning to invalidate an additional layer of campaign finance regulation. Citizens United dealt specifically with corporate independent expenditures, not contribution limits to independent-expenditure-only committees.

The policy consequences of the decision were immediate and substantial. SpeechNow.org v. FEC effectively created Super PACs, organizations capable of raising and spending unlimited sums of money so long as they remain independent.

Equally significant was the Supreme Court’s decision not to intervene. Despite the consequences of SpeechNow, the case was never reviewed on the merits by SCOTUS and was actually denied review entirely. As a result, the DC Circuit’s interpretation effectively became settled constitutional practice without a direct Supreme Court ruling explicitly authorizing Super PACs themselves.

The institutional implications of this are substantial, as SpeechNow demonstrates how lower federal courts can reshape national political systems through the application and expansion of Supreme Court precedent, particularly when SCOTUS declines to revisit or clarify them.

Although Citizens United became the symbolic focal point of public outrage surrounding campaign finance, SpeechNow was arguably the decision that operationalized the modern Super PAC system. Yet unlike Citizens United, SpeechNow received little public attention, limited media scrutiny, and no direct SCOTUS review despite fundamentally altering the structure of campaign finance in the US. But why?

The Incentivized Silence

While Citizens United received extensive national media attention as a landmark Supreme Court decision, Speechnow.org v. FEC received comparatively little coverage. This disparity reflects not only editorial framing preferences but also structural incentives that shape which legal developments are reported.

The difference in the coverage is striking. Citizens United was featured across virtually every major national news outlet including: The New York Times (Lean Left bias), The Washington Post (Lean Left), CNN (Lean Left), Fox News (Right), NPR (Lean Left), ABC News (Lean Left), CBS News (Lean Left), NBC News (Lean Left), and Politico (Lean Left). A search of The New York Times archive alone returns more than 2,300 results for “Citizens United,” while “SpeechNow.org” yields a fraction of that amount with a humbling 256 results.

But SpeechNow was arguably just as consequential, if not more. Recall that the Federal Election Campaign Act and subsequent campaign finance reforms were designed to restore public trust by increasing transparency and allowing the public to see where political money was coming from. SpeechNow helped create a loophole in that system. While Super PACs must disclose their donors, nonprofit organizations such as 501(c)(4)s are generally not required to disclose theirs. As a result, a nonprofit can contribute millions of dollars to a Super PAC, and the public sees only the nonprofit's name, not the original source of the funds. This practice gave rise to what is now known as "dark money."

Dark money spending has since reached record levels, with groups that do not disclose their donors spending approximately $1.9 billion during recent election cycles. Although this alone does not prove intentional suppression of SpeechNow, it raises legitimate questions about whether the decision received the level of public scrutiny its consequences warranted.

After these two decisions, Super PAC spending grew quickly. According to OpenSecrets, independent expenditures went from $623 million in 2012 to about $2.7 billion in 2020, and exponentially higher in later cycles.

The majority of their funds are spent on advertisements. Televisions, digital platforms, and other media companies sell airtime or advertising space, which Super PACs pay for. Pew Research Center data on major local TV broadcasters show political advertising revenue rising from about $574 million in 2012 to about $2.0 billion in 2020. Political advertising spending overall doubled between 2008 and 2012 eventually exceeding an estimated $13 billion by 2024.

This chart above depicts the almost parallel growth in numbers: when Super PAC spending increased, political advertising revenue for media companies increased with it. Basically, Super PAC spending flows directly into media company revenues through advertising.

This introduces at minimum an appearance of a conflict of interest. Food for thought: how can the American people confide in media outlets to cover campaign finance developments when they benefit financially from the advertising expenditures those developments enabled?

Maybe it is the case that SpeechNow was simply not relevant enough for widespread media coverage because it was a lower-court ruling rather than a Supreme Court decision. However, lower federal court cases have repeatedly generated massive national attention when they seem to affect constitutional doctrine.

Take for example the Terri Schiavo case, which became a nationwide media phenomenon long before Supreme Court involvement; The New York Times cited it 1,318 times. Likewise, United States v. Windsor and the Texas abortion litigation received extensive national coverage, as commentators and journalists framed the lower courts as dramatically impacting constitutional law.

Perhaps media outlets had little incentive to give SpeechNow national attention because it could have drawn awareness to the legal foundation behind the surge in political advertising. Unlike cases involving same-sex marriage or abortion, SpeechNow directly coincided with the rapid expansion of political advertising revenue flowing into media markets across the political spectrum. Greater attention to the case may have also increased public pressure for review, which could have downstream effects on the advertising revenue of media companies as a result of possible reimposed contribution limits.

It is important to mention that private campaign financing was steadily increasing before SpeechNow following Barack Obama’s 2008 decision to decline public funding. However, while political advertising spending had been on a gradual rise, the post-SpeechNow and Citizens United era transformed that growth from relatively linear into exponential because of the emergence of Super PACs.

Maybe this disparity is entirely coincidental. Maybe SpeechNow.org v. FEC was simply too technical, too insignificant, or too complex to sustain national attention. But when one case becomes one of the most publicly discussed campaign finance decisions in modern history while another case quietly operationalizes the entire Super PAC system with comparatively little scrutiny, the imbalance is hard to ignore. Especially when the institutions responsible for informing the public are also becoming some of the largest beneficiaries of the post-SpeechNow political advertising boom. If SpeechNow helped create one of the most profitable political advertising environments in modern media history, who exactly had an incentive to make the public understand it?

Alexsa Sanz is a pre-law and anthropology student at Flagler College and a student-fellow at Pathway America. She has a Lean Left bias.

This piece was reviewed and edited by News Analyst and Social Media Editor Malayna J. Bizier (Right) and News and Social Media Editor Jessica Carpenter (Center)