Marc Elias
speaker
622 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 7 Jul
Marc Elias’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The second is I think there's kind of like a sense, well, the campaign finance system is broken, so how much more broken is it going to get?
And I get that.
But this was a very important case for a couple of reasons.
The first is that the Supreme Court in 1976 upheld the basic framework of our campaign finance laws.
The idea was if you are making a contribution—
to a candidate, Congress can limit how much.
And it doesn't have to be super precise, like whether the limit is $2,000 or $3,000 or $5,000, like, you know, we're going to let them have reasonable contribution limits.
If you're trying to limit independent expenditures, then we're not going to let you do that.
Citizens United in 2010 extends that to corporations.
And then the third was disclosure.
We've seen a lot of breakdown around disclosure.
We've obviously seen the through citizen genetics aftermath, this kind of like explosion of the independent expenditure and kind of what is independent.
And like, you know, these super PACs are now big, big, not just players, but like in some ways dominant players.
But the one piece that it kind of held was this contribution thing.
Like we're going to limit the amount of money that can be given to a campaign or in the case of a coordinated expenditure, an in-kind contribution, how much money you can spend where you're talking to the campaign and basically doing what it wants.
And the political parties had always been given more special rights there than anybody else.
The political parties could give could essentially spend millions of dollars, for example, in a big Senate race in total coordination with the candidate, totally 100 percent paying their bills, even right, just total coordination.
But the RNC said that's not enough.
They want that to be unlimited.
And they tried to do that in the mid 1990s and they failed.
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