Casino Owner’s Gingrich Gift Shreds Court’s Logic: Noah Feldman

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-17/casino-owner-gingrich-gift-shreds-court-logic-commentary-by-noah-feldman.html

For purely parochial reasons, I like to keep tabs on Jewish boys from around Boston who have made good. Stephen Greenblatt, the Shakespeare scholar and award- winning author; Bobby Sager, the global philanthropist with a TV show based on his adventures; Mike Bloomberg (you may have heard of him); and now … Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire who is bankrolling the Newt Gingrich campaign in South Carolina.

There’s nothing new about wealthy people getting involved in politics. George Soros very publicly gave money to the Democratic Party to beat George W. Bush. The Koch brothers finance a wide range of conservative political causes. And Mayor Bloomberg has paid for his own campaigns. What is new -- indeed, perhaps unprecedented in the era since electoral reform took root in the U.S. -- is a single magnate in effect keeping alive a candidate who is not either himself or a close family member.

This new twist on plutocracy is the direct result of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case. After the 2010 decision, we all knew that corporations would be allowed to make unlimited donations to organizations that spend money “independently” of political campaigns. But only a few close observers noticed that, in justifying its decision, the Supreme Court also said that there was no danger of “the appearance of corruption” so long as expenditures were independent of the campaign.
Perceptions of Corruption

This was the loophole to end all loopholes. The Supreme Court was putting its legal holding in the form of an empirical claim about the way people’s perceptions of corruption work. It followed that not only corporations but individuals could make unlimited contributions to what have come to be called super- PACs without creating a legally cognizable appearance of corruption.