Project 2029: Campaign Finance Reform Comes First

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:00)
Hi, we're on vacation, but we have an amazing special episode for you.
In the last year, we set out to ask some questions to the smartest people in their fields about what Democrats should do when they regain power. We hope you'll enjoy this special episode of Project 2029, A Reimagining. Hello, and welcome to part one of our new docuseries, Project 2029, A Reimagining. I'm Molly JongFast, a columnist, a podcaster, and a person you occasionally see on Cable News. In this series, we're trying to start a conversation about where the Democratic Party goes when it regains power, with an agenda that puts people first and creates incentives for many of the voters that Democrats may have lost to get those people back into the Democratic Party. In this episode, we're going to discuss campaign finance reform, a subject that may not seem very sexy, but is actually critical. It's seen by most people with experience in government to be the first step to getting American politics back to normal or perhaps better than normal. Campaign finance reform is critical to rooting out corruption and crony capitalism, as well as getting our politicians to focus on the will of the voters and not the will of the billionaires. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let's get you up to speed. You may have noticed that the Heritage Foundation's wildly ambitious Project 2025 has been implemented at lightning speed, when nearly half of its goals reached in just nine months. The agenda that the Heritage Foundation has set forth, which includes other MAGA actors, has moved at breakneck speeds to reshape America into a kind of right-wing policy testing lab that is both failing its citizens and creating a dystopia that many of us don't recognize. In this series, we are imagining not only what Democrats can do when they regain power, but also how to regain the support and trust that Democrats desperately need after all of the damage that has been done in both of the Trump administrations. We've assembled some of the smartest people we know to explain to us how to fix what seems like a very broken mess. Billionaires pouring money into our elections and people not being served by it. Let's set the stage with one of the most damning Supreme Court decisions of all time.

**Michael Waldman** (2:46)
I'm Michael Waldman. I'm the president of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. We work to strengthen and reform and defend our systems of democracy and justice. There's always been an effort to make sure that money doesn't have too big an impact on politics, that you need money to run for office and that's not new and a surprise. You want to minimize its impact. You want to minimize the corruption. There were laws on the books that were strong in many instances for a century or more.
The Supreme Court took a wrecking ball to those laws. The most notorious case in Citizens United, but it wasn't the only one. Citizens United said that corporations could not be prohibited from spending on campaigns and more broadly that if money is independent, that it can't be corrupting and that would always be disclosed. Well, we know, of course, that the money is corrupting in many instances, that it's not disclosed, and it's now coming in massive amounts. Elon Musk spending $250 million for Donald Trump would have been flatly illegal before January 2010
That was brought to us by John Roberts, Supreme Court and Citizens United.

**Tiffany Muller** (3:59)
I'm Tiffany Muller. I'm president of End Citizens United, and we're a grassroots powered organization. We have about four million members across the country. Our simple mission is we want to get big money out of politics. We want to protect our democracy. Citizens United was a decision in January 2010 by the Supreme Court, and essentially boiled down, it took two really terrible ideas and it merged them together. It said, money equals speech and corporations are people. Really, what it allowed is it allowed this unlimited and in a lot of cases, undisclosed money to start flooding into our election cycle.
What we've seen in the 15 years since that decision is a real shift in power in Washington away from voters, away from accountability to voters, and more toward accountability to those who write the biggest checks and to the special interests. That's had a really devastating impact on our politics and on our policy outcomes. You can see it in everyday life, whether we're talking about energy prices or prescription drug prices or gun safety. It has meant real gridlock and dysfunction for the past 15 years on some of our biggest pressing policy priorities. Citizens United says, all right, if people and corporations can spend unlimited amounts to influence our elections. What's happened since then is we've seen the creation and the rise of what's called super PACs.