Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The New Legal Fight to Destroy Super PACs Forever

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

FREE SPEECH FRIDAY SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenz   Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://ww...w.usermag.co     For the first time in fifteen years, there’s a real shot at ending billionaire control of American politics. A groundbreaking legal effort spearheaded by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, backed by an unlikely coalition of billionaires like Mark Cuban and Reid Hoffman, is taking direct aim at the legal foundation that created Super PACs. I'm going to be covering this legal fight closely. Larry Lessig joined me on this week's Free Speech Friday to break down his legal fight, where things stand, and what needs to happen next in order to win this fight. If you like this video, please support me on Patreon!! https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenz  Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz      https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0     https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz 

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 We've built a political system where a couple hundred families are basically funding the most significant races in the nation right now, which means a couple hundred families have the power to veto anything our government is going to do that they don't want our government to do. Back in 2010, two seminal court cases passed that basically created the entire corrupt political system that we have today, where billionaire-backed super PACs exert outsized influence on politics and erode our democracy. These two court cases are so influential. One is a Supreme Court case called Citizens United that you've probably heard a lot about. It was a Supreme Court decision in 2010 that ruled that corporations have a first amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money on independent packs, as long as those packs don't coordinate directly with candidates.
Starting point is 00:00:48 The second case actually never reached the Supreme Court, but it was just as influential. It's called Speech Now v. the FEC. and it was a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. That case challenged the federal limits on how much money individuals could contribute to PACs. So just to break it down further, Citizens United ruled on spending, basically saying again that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money on PACs, speech now regulated contributions, or rather failed to regulate contributions. The D.C. court ruled that imposing any contribution limits to political action committees would violate the First Amendment.
Starting point is 00:01:24 speech now ruling essentially paved the way for super PACs as we know it, even though the Supreme Court never directly reviewed or approved this expansion of political spending rights. So Citizens United says, hey, corporations have a right to unlimited spending on super PACs. And speech now, not a Supreme Court decision, but the DC Circuit decision says corporations can make unlimited contributions. And of course, all of this was under the pretense that these PACs and soon to be super PACs would never directly coordinate with campaigns or candidates or do anything unethical. But these two cases together created this massive loophole that gave birth to the concept of super PACs and again has allowed billionaires to influence our political system ever since. So far, most of the efforts to dismantle the system have focused on Citizens United.
Starting point is 00:02:07 There have been these grassroots efforts to overturn Citizens United. Josh Hawley, a super conservative member of Congress has actually been one of the few lawmakers that has come out aggressively against Citizens United. And you often hear this cry from activists, overturned Citizens United, we have to get money out of politics. No one has been working harder to get money out of politics than Lawrence Lessig. He's an American legal scholar and political activist. He's extremely well known for fighting on behalf of average working people for free speech protections. He's been a professor at Stanford Law, Harvard. And most recently, he's been leading the charge on this very novel and unique scheme
Starting point is 00:02:41 to fundamentally dismantle Citizens United through attacking that other court case in the district court's speech now. Because Citizens United is not getting overturned anytime soon, I think that Larry Lessig's campaign and this interesting legal framework that he's building with a lot of really fascinating people like Mark Cuban and others on board is probably the best chance that we'll ever have in this generation to permanently remove billionaire influence over our political system. So I wanted to have him on to explain all of this, really break down the laws that he's challenging, how he plans to make these legal arguments, and talk about why this legal fight is one of the most important legal. fights of our time. So without further ado, here's our conversation. Hi, Larry. Welcome. Thanks. Thanks for having me, Taylor. All right. So to start off, can you explain what super PACs are? I feel like we hear about them so much in the media. What are these things and how have they affected our political ecosystem? Well, they're evil. That's all one has to say about them. So what a super PAC technically is, is a political action committee that can accept contributions of any size.
Starting point is 00:03:45 So unlike a campaign, which is limited in the size of the contribution they can accept, or a political action committee that coordinates with a campaign, which is also limited in the size of the contribution they can accept. Because of this really embarrassing to the law mistake made by a lower federal court 15 years ago, independent political action committees are free to accept contributions of unlimited size, and we've seen contributions of more than a billion dollars to these independent political action. committees. And so that's what a super PAC is. So as you mentioned, you know, super PACs have had just sort of this devastating effect on our political environment. Can you go into a little bit of detail
Starting point is 00:04:25 on how they were created? It seems like they're very much like a modern phenomenon. Yeah, and an accident. They were created three months after the Supreme Court decided a very different case, a case called Citizens United versus FEC. And the question in Citizens United was whether a corporation could spend unlimited amounts of money promoting or opposing a political candidate. In that case, it was a corporation trying to promote a film that attacked Hillary Clinton. And so federal law at that time limited the amount that a corporation could spend independently from a campaign. And what the Supreme Court said was, well, look, the only legitimate basis for limiting political speech is the risk of corruption, something I call quid pro quo corruption,
Starting point is 00:05:08 this for that corruption. And if the speech is independent, meaning the candidate doesn't coordinate at all with the campaign, then there's no risk of quid pro quo corruption or put it the other way around. If there's a quid pro quo, if there's a deal, then the speech is not independent. And if it's not independent, it's illegal to spend that amount of money supporting a campaign
Starting point is 00:05:29 because you're capped in the amount you can give to a campaign. So the court said, if the speech is independent, then, quote, by definition, there's no risk of corruption. So therefore, there can't be. any limit on the amount of speech. That was Citizens United. Three months later, the D.C. Circuit had to address a related question. And the question was, okay, if you can spend unlimited amounts of money, can you give unlimited amounts of money to a committee that is going to spend that money? And the D.C. Circuit said, well, you know, if there's no legitimate interest for limiting
Starting point is 00:06:02 the spending, there can't be any legitimate interest for limiting the contribution. So, therefore, the limits on the size of contributions to independent political action, committees are unconstitutional. And that gave us super PACs. Got it. And that second case was called Speech Now. Is that right? That's right. Speech now versus FEC. And at the time when these cases passed, super PACs weren't as much of a thing, right? Like, I don't think that people necessarily predicted the really toxic environment this created. And as you mentioned, now it's become so pervasive. And I think we all see how it can be used for corruption. So can you tell me a little bit about what got this on your radar and how you kind of plan to fight this system. Because I think we hear a lot about people have
Starting point is 00:06:44 heard the word Citizens United and people are always talking about overturning Citizens United. And as I understand, you think that that is kind of the wrong way to go about maybe or an effective way to go about kind of challenging this super PAC system. Well, it's certainly ineffective because there's exactly zero chance. You can look it up in Google. There's exactly zero chance that the United States Supreme Court is going to overturn Citizens United, just not going to happen. And, you know, there's a lot of movements. American Promise is my favorite that's trying to stand up an effort to amend the Constitution. But they want to amend the Constitution through Congress, which means you've got to find two-thirds of Congress to support that amendment, which means you'd need at least like 15 or 16 Republican senators. And I don't think we have one Republican senator who's on the record supporting overturning Citizens United. And this Supreme Court has only been made even stronger to support Citizens United than when it decided the case. So that's not going to happen. But the key to recognize is that it's not the spending by corporations that's causing the great corruption in our political system right now. It's the contributions to these independent political action committees, these super PACs, that's causing the corruption.
Starting point is 00:07:56 Because the vast majority, increasing proportion of this is dark money. We don't even know who the money is coming from. And these PACs begin to behave extremely strategically so that candidates know, that they cannot take a position that is opposed by any of these packs, or they'll find millions of dollars dropped in opposition to their candidacy. So these become the kind of puppet masters over our politicians. And there's basically very little the politicians can do to resist it. You know, many people criticized Kamala Harris after the election,
Starting point is 00:08:30 Bernie Sanders did because he said she didn't talk about issues that working people cared about. She couldn't afford to talk about the issues working people cared about. because of the extraordinary amount of super PAC money that had come into our campaign and had shackled the freedom of the campaign to adopt certain issues or press certain causes. So this gold, the campaign, thinks is extremely important, but it's basically golden handcuffs that's stopping them from being able to respond to what voters want as opposed to what the politicians want.
Starting point is 00:09:01 So the question is, how can we address these super PACs? We want to say that the size of the contribution that you can give, to any PAC, an independent political action committee or a regular pack, is limited. Just like the size of the contribution you can give to a candidate is limited. You can't go up to Donald Trump and say, look, I'll give you a billion dollars for your campaign because you can only give Donald Trump a limited amount, $3,300. It's gone up. I don't know what it is this cycle, but the point is it's limited by law. And we say the size of a contribution to a PAC, an independent political action committee, should be limited as well. And that's the limit that. That's the limit that
Starting point is 00:09:39 that the DC Circuit in speech now struck down. And so that's what created the super PACs. So the point is we've built a political system where a couple hundred families are basically funding the most significant races in the nation right now, which means a couple hundred families have the power to veto anything our government is gonna do
Starting point is 00:09:58 that they don't want our government to do. And that's because there is no limit in the size of the contribution they can give. If you limited their contribution, you know, some PACs would be super popular people would want to support them. So maybe a million people would give $1,000 to that pack. And that would be a lot of money. But the point is it would reflect a million people. It wouldn't reflect a couple hundred or 10 or 15 people, which is the way the current system actually functions. So you would essentially be overturning the speech now decision, not the citizens unit decision itself. Exactly right. Yes. I think what you said about how it would better represent the people is so smart and makes so much sense. And obviously is a more Democrat. system than the one we have now. Okay. So in order to overturn speech now, what are you doing? And how is this going to play out? Like, what are the first steps that you're taking to fight this decision?
Starting point is 00:10:50 What we decided to do was to get the question on a ballot initiative. Originally, I wanted to do it in Massachusetts, because I'm lazy and I live in Massachusetts. And the Massachusetts Attorney General blocked us, now the governor, blocked us saying it violated Citizens United, which, of course, it has nothing to do with Citizens United, but that was her position. So the Then I was at a dinner, leadership now dinner in Maine, and some of the leaders around the table, including Rick Bennett, who was then a Republican state senator from Maine, said, why do we do it in Maine? And so we, equal citizens, the group that I started, decided to commit to support getting the initiative on the ballot because what we did is a poll, and we found overwhelming support
Starting point is 00:11:31 in Maine for this initiative. So we got on the ballot. And what happened in the election, last election was that 74.9% of Mainers voted in favor of this initiative, which basically eliminates super PACs in the state of Maine. And that's because overwhelmingly Americans oppose this corrupting system for funding campaigns. I gathered signatures for this initiative on Election Day 2023, the year before. I was in a tiny little town called Hollis, Maine, which is pretty conservative, but, you know, it's a Maine conservative town. First guy to come up to me said, I'm gathering signatures to get Donald Trump on the ballot. What are you here for?
Starting point is 00:12:11 And I showed him my initiative. And he read it and he said, hell yeah. And he signed the initiative. And he said, I'm going to get everybody who signs my Trump petition to come over and sign your initiative to it. And that's what he did for the hours that he was there. Because this is not an issue, which is Republican versus Democrat. This is the issue of the politicians versus the people.
Starting point is 00:12:29 And the people are so deeply frustrated with this corrupt system that they see all over the place. You can't believe that the politicians care about the voters because you know the politicians are bending over backwards to get the money they need to fund their campaigns or bring their party back into power. So when Maine passed this initiative overwhelmingly, we knew it would be challenged. And indeed, within a month, it was challenged by two super PACs in Maine. And so that challenge went to a district court. And we lost in the district court, but we lost in the best possible way. And now we are literally this week filing briefs in.
Starting point is 00:13:05 in the First Circuit Court of Appeals, which is the appellate court that governs Maine in Massachusetts and Puerto Rico. And in that court, a court which has never decided the question before, we think we have a very clear shot to getting that court to agree with us that super PACs are not compelled by the First Amendment, that James Madison, when he was writing the First Amendment, was not thinking, what we need is a system where 10 people can control the elections. That's what we need in America. But instead wanted a system, as Madison said it, which would be dependent on the people alone, quote unquote. And then he went on to say, by the people, he means, quote, not the rich, more than the poor. That was his system. And we've corrupted that system. So we knew it would be challenged. The First Circuit's never considered this question.
Starting point is 00:13:48 When we win in the First Circuit, the Supreme Court's got to take the case. And when we get to the Supreme Court, what we're going to say is not overturned Citizens United. What we're going to say is apply the reasoning. of Citizens United to a set of facts you've never considered before. You don't have to change any of your theories for what the First Amendment requires. You can apply existing law to this new set of facts, and if you do, we win, or America wins. It's the end of Super PACs, because if we win in Maine,
Starting point is 00:14:18 it will revive the federal law that banned Super PACs nationally. So we think we have a shot to end Super PACs by the 2028 election, which would be a critical election, to turn back the tide of super rich control of exactly how our elections develop. Okay, so you're appealing in the First Circuit Court of Appeals now. What if you lose that one as well? Well, if we lose that one, there's a very slight chance the Supreme Court would take it up nonetheless. I mean, I'm embarrassed. I didn't see this point originally, you know, so I'm not as smart as I thought I was.
Starting point is 00:14:50 But I'm also embarrassed for the legal profession because the idea that this mistake has been sitting out there for 15 years is pretty astonishing, given the consequence it's had for our politics. The idea that we've had these billionaires running our elections, Elon Musk, $277 million in the last election, that the idea this has been the way democracy has worked for the last 15 years because of a mistake is kind of crazy.
Starting point is 00:15:15 But the thing about the mistake is that the D.C. Circuit and then a couple other circuit courts within a couple years of the D.C. circuit, all repeated the same mistake. What they said, all of them, was that there's no risk of quid pro quo corruption with a contribution.
Starting point is 00:15:29 to a super PAC. Now, what our lawyer did, we have a really fantastic lawyer who's intervened in the case, Neil Katyal, who right this week is preparing to argue the tariffs case in the Supreme Court. But what Neil did was succeed in convincing the district court, that's just wrong. That obviously, there's a risk of quid pro quo corruption. Look at Robert Menendez. The briefs in this case show about seven other cases where politicians are engaging in a quid pro quo, where they're promising some favor from the government in exchange for money going to their super PAC. So it's not rocket science. once you see it. So clearly there's a risk of quick-proclaw corruption. And ours is the first case to confess, to concede, yeah, there's a risk of corruption. But even then, this court said,
Starting point is 00:16:11 the state has no power to do anything about it. Well, that's just never been the law. And the Supreme Court has never said that there's a risk of corruption, but there's nothing you can do about it. What the court has said is, if there's a risk of corruption, you can do something about it. But where there's no plausible risk, you can't restrict political speech. So we think we have an excellent shot in the First Circuit to get the First Circuit to correct that mistake, which then would get us into the United States Supreme Court. And in the United States Supreme Court, again, I think that court is going to find under the existing law, we win. Now, what reason would the court have for upholding Super PACs?
Starting point is 00:16:49 Because, number one, super PACs don't benefit one party over the other. They used to. They used to be a really good tool for, Republicans to be Democrats. Not anymore. Democrats have gotten just as good as the Republicans in raising the money. So it doesn't benefit one party of the other. It's just an arms race. And for the court, what do they gain? They lose an enormous amount. If they change their doctrine to decide the super PACs are somehow mandated by the Constitution, they gain an enormous amount if they say, look, we're not a returning Citizens United. We still believe in Citizens United. But that's because in that context, there's no risk of corruption. Here, there's a a risk of corruption. So we've always said, if there's corruption, you can regulate it. So it just
Starting point is 00:17:31 turns out that our principles give a result that 80% of America will love. So why wouldn't they do it? What's the reason not to? So essentially, like, if this case of yours went through the First Circuit Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court, they wouldn't be necessarily regulating on Citizens and United. They would just be, like, applying the standards that they've set previously with Citizens United to these lower cases. and that would overturn speech now, and it would affirm the case that you're trying to make. Exactly right. It would affirm the initiative, reverse the district court. And, you know, if we went in the First Circuit, affirm the First Circuit. But the point is right. You're exactly right.
Starting point is 00:18:07 What the Supreme Court does is it decides cases, but it articulates principles when it decides those cases. And what we do as lawyers is we try to apply those principles to new cases. And if the system is working the way it's supposed to work, if it's a rule of law system, you should be able to predict how cases will be decided on the basis of the principles articulated in the case. Remember when Dobbs was decided, overturning Roe v. Wade, and all these anti-abortion laws came from the dead, came back to life. Well, that's the same thing here. If they uphold our initiative, then the law that the D.C. Circuit overturned in speech now comes back to life. And so that's the end of Super PACs nationally, as well as in Maine, and a bunch of other states that have laws regulating Super PACs, too. So you said that you're filing
Starting point is 00:18:51 all of this stuff in the court this week, that first court of appeals. What is the time like after that. I mean, do you know how long it'll take them to look it over? Is this one of those things where you actually go into court and argue or is it all just sort of paperwork happening? How does it play out? There's lots of drama, lots of in-courtroom drama. So the papers will all be filed by December. The amicus briefs will be filed tomorrow. These are basically briefs by people who have a certain perspective. They want to add friends of the court briefs is what that means. Then the other side will file three weeks from now. And then we have about a week to respond to them. And so that means by the end of the year, the court will have all the briefs. And then the court decides when it will schedule argument. And it'll probably be sometime in February. So in February, the Attorney General from Maine and our lawyer, Neocaltial, will argue to reverse the district court.
Starting point is 00:19:41 And the other side will argue against that in the courthouse here in Boston. And, you know, that court could decide the case typically by the summer because they have clerks that, like, leave at the summer so they don't want to keep the cases over. So by the summer. And so that means we could be. in the United States Supreme Court in the next term, which means in the term of 26 to 27. And so in that term, the Supreme Court could decide that super PACs are in fact not part of the Constitution's mandate, which means we could end super PACs before the end of June 2027.
Starting point is 00:20:13 It seems like this is going to be fought tooth and nail by the super PACs. So like you mentioned, two of them obviously already spent a lot of money to fight this initiative in Maine. What sort of pushback are you anticipating and how are you planning to fight back and kind of keep pushing this through? You know, what was interesting about the fight in Maine is that there was no opposition in the election itself. Like, we were worried they were going to come in and spend all sorts of money, creating all sorts of fear and uncertainty and distrust around this initiative, like saying,
Starting point is 00:20:42 we're trying to stomp out free speech or whatever. They didn't say a word because they realized that people are with them, 74.9%, more than 600,000 Mainers, which is more who voted for our initiative than have ever voted for anything in the history of Maine. So this is strongly supported. What they're going to do is they're going to be fighting just with lawyers. So they will deploy their lawyers and their lobbyists to fight this. And their lawyers are going to say all sorts of things like, you know, it's the end of free speech in America and things like that. What's really great about the court system is that unlike in Congress, where, you know, if you're in a committee hearing and you're making an argument on the basis of
Starting point is 00:21:20 principle, you're looking at a bunch of people who are raising money from people who benefit from going against that principle. That's not true in the Supreme Court. You know, those guys and women have a life tender. They don't need favors from anybody to keep their job. And so they will be listening on the merits of the argument. And I think that they will have a good reason, a really good reason to agree with us. And so that that's the hopefulness about this case. And do you think that that's even true for like this lower court? Like I'm rooting for you guys to get to the Supreme Court. But do you think there's other things that they could do to pressure, as you mentioned, like this circuit court?
Starting point is 00:21:55 No, I don't think so. It's just the kind of amazing job of federal judges. You know, many state judges are elected. So if it's a state court, it can be a different dynamic. But these federal judges, you know, they live in this protected space where they get to decide cases based on what they think is right or wrong. Sometimes the cases are political in the sense that they involve policy. And so it depends on whether it was a conservative appointee or a liberal appointee.
Starting point is 00:22:20 So, you know, I'm not saying it's all determined. But they're not going to be. pressured. And, you know, I do think that there's a way in which you've got to be brave to go with us. So I think the district court, on the one hand, did us a huge favor by acknowledging the mistake of all the earlier courts who said that there's no risk of corruption. And she said, yeah, of course there is. So that was brave. But she wasn't completely brave because she didn't want to be the first federal judge to uphold a limit on independent political action committees. And so she found a whole new theory, completely made up, never ever expressed in any opinion of any Supreme Court or lower court
Starting point is 00:22:56 for why, even though there's a risk of corruption, the state can't regulate that risk of corruption. So, okay, you know, she's doing a little bit of creative writing and it's not going to stop us in the Court of Appeals. It doesn't slow us down. It gets us a chance to get the Court of Appeals to focus on the mistake. And if they do, I think we win. Now, you know, the other cool, really cool argument that Neil is pushing, the reason why we're in the case, is that we want to make an original originalist argument. So this wasn't national news, but about a year and a half ago, Josh Holly, very conservative Republican senator from the state of Missouri, introduced a bill in Congress to overturn Citizens United. And when he introduced the bill, he gave a speech. And in the speech,
Starting point is 00:23:35 he said, every good originalist knows that the original meaning of the First Amendment would never limit Congress's ability to control how corporations spend their money. So he was signaling something important because the Supreme Court has literally never considered what the original meaning of the First Amendment should say about campaign finance regulations, never considered it at all. The first case to create modern campaign finance regulation was a case called Buckley v. Vallejo, decided in January of 1976. That court didn't spend a paragraph, a sentence, giving us a sense of what the original meaning of the words of the First Amendment meant, but didn't care at all to address that question. So what Josh Hawley is saying is like, if you've got a conservative
Starting point is 00:24:15 court that in all sorts of contexts telling us we're going to be governed by the original meaning of the Constitution. That's why we have the Second Amendment, like in this extremely bold and aggressive sense. Then we ought to be consistent. Let's ask the question about the First Amendment, too. And so that argument is also going to be in the case. So, you know, we're going to go to the Supreme Court. We think we have the three liberals who've all expressed the view that they think that contribution should be capable of being limited. We're aiming for the Chief Justice and probably Justice Kavanaugh for this very simple argument about apply Citizens United to a new set of facts. turns out we win. And then we're going to appeal to these conservatives, the kind of Scalia
Starting point is 00:24:53 want to be. I clerked for Scalia. Surprise, surprise, but I clerked for Scalia early in his career when he was really eager to demonstrate he was not a partisan hack. He was going to apply his principles, even if they were inconsistent with his politics. And he did that a number of times would I clerk for him. And I think there are other justices on the court like that. I think Amy, Connie Barrett, I think Justice Gorsuch are people who are trying to demonstrate that they've got principles and those principles matter. And so the originalist argument will be pitched at them and say, okay, even if you're not going to announce a whole new theory of the First Amendment as applied to campaign finance, this gives you a reason to follow the chief and apply the standard in a way that
Starting point is 00:25:29 allows the people of Maine to try to clean up the corrupt elections that they see there and everywhere else in the country. Right. So when you're saying like all this stuff about free speech and talking about how like these super blacks could say, oh, this is a threat to free speech, what you're saying and tell me if I'm is essentially that actually there's no legal precedent for saying that unlimited super PAC contributions are free speech. Is that right? Yeah, I mean, that the contributions are not free speech. What the Supreme Court said in the case of Buckley was that there's a very big difference between spending or expenditures and contributions. If you make an expenditure, if you spend a million dollars and put a full page ad in the New York Times, that's free speech and that's fully protected. And nothing
Starting point is 00:26:08 that we're talking about is limiting that ability. And indeed, even if we win, Rich people and corporations and unions and political action committees can spend whatever they want independently of a campaign. But even there, it's not unregulated. You know, you only can spend this unlimited amount if you are not, quote, coordinating with a campaign. And it's a very careful set of regulations about what it means to be coordinating with the campaign. And if you turn out to be coordinating, even without showing there's any quid pro quo, you violated federal campaign law because you've given much more. than the campaign limit. So you can be fined. If it's intentional, you can be criminally prosecuted for that.
Starting point is 00:26:48 So nothing here limits the ability to spend the money. It's only the contribution. And what the Supreme Court said is, look, it's not that contributions don't have some speech value, like the fact that I give you $1,000 means I'm saying I really support you. And the fact I give you $2,000 means I'm saying I'm supporting you more. But that's less significant than the ability to spend the money directly. And so the court is protected, the ability to spend it directly,
Starting point is 00:27:12 even if it's limited the ability to contribute. Got it. And so you're just trying to limit the contributions because the contributions don't necessarily count as speech. It's the spending once the Super PAC has it that counts on speech. Yeah, I mean, it's the spending that is the high-valued speech, as the court has put it. The contributions are some, you know, they have some speech component to it. But there can be limits around it, right? Like you said, like spending, okay, $1,000 from everyone is very different than like $10 million from a corporation.
Starting point is 00:27:41 Yeah, there can be limits. If the limit is trying to avoid corruption, that's the point. And all we're doing is demonstrating that's what we're trying to do, eliminate this risk of corruption. And there's obviously corruption because you guys have found all these cases, like you said, where there is this quid pro quo. Absolutely. I mean, and look at our government today.
Starting point is 00:27:58 Who doubts that this is going on all over the place? I feel like Elon Musk is the person that comes to mind for a lot of people. He literally tweeted, I think, that he like, I don't know that he tweeted that he bought the election, but certainly kind of like implied it and, you know, has done all this shady stuff. So I imagine there's a lot of billionaires that will not be on board with this plan. How do you plan to combat that? And have you, I mean, are you concerned about any of that and that they will use their vast resources to try to shut this down? And do you have any billionaires on your side that are for this? Yeah, absolutely we do. I don't hang with billionaires
Starting point is 00:28:30 a lot. But I actually have over the 18 years I've been in this fight, had a lot of relationships with really wealthy people who hate the system. And one reason they hate the system is that they realize they're only valued for their money. So you're a billionaire. You come out and you say, here's what I think policy should be. Must be hard. Yeah. Well, I know. I don't feel sorry for them, but I'd say they themselves look at the system and say, this just cheapens us in the system. So there are many who oppose it. And indeed, we're going to have a brief file tomorrow by Mark Cuban, Vin Ryan, a guy named William von Mifflin and Steve Jervitson, who are billionaires who are going say this system is terrible and we oppose it. And so that will begin, we think in the Supreme
Starting point is 00:29:14 Court, there'll be many more who sign a similar brief because, you know, I think they're going to want to take sides. And many of them will say that this system destroys the ability for people to believe in their democracy. And that doesn't benefit anybody. It certainly doesn't benefit them in the long term. And so that's why they're going to oppose it too. All right. Well, thank you so much for chatting us through all of this day. I can't wait to see how it plays out. And we'll have to have you back on when you guys hopefully move forward and make it out of the circuit court, hopefully to the Supreme Court. Thank you for having me, Taylor.
Starting point is 00:29:45 It's a lot of fun. All right, that's it for this week's free speech Friday. If you like the work I do, please support me on Patreon via the link below. You can also buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter, usermag. That's usermag.com. You can also get my newsletter through Patreon. On my Patreon, I do bonus episodes, behind the scenes content, a monthly live stream, and more. Right now, I have zero brand deals, zero.
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