This fresh hell brought to you by Citizens United

Elon Musk, a spawn of CU, is a walking poster boy for its reversal.

These are the times that try men’s souls… Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.

~ Thomas Paine, American Crisis, 1776

If you’ve watched or attended a town hall meeting recently, you’ve seen unfiltered outrage over Musk and DOGE. Cutting costs to improve government efficiencies is one thing, wholesale elimination of systems that took 250 years to build is another.

As Musk takes a chainsaw to the federal government, Trump plays golf, posts absurdist videos, and rage tweets from the toilet at 3 a.m. Meanwhile, GOP Congressmen keep quiet, their lips sealed by Musk’s credible threats to primary anyone who speaks out.

After effectively having been silenced under Citizens United, the ruling that teed up Trump’s treasonous campaign of destruction, citizens’ voices are rising to fill the void.

This fresh hell brought to you by Citizens United

In 2010, CU allowed organizations, corporations, and the uber rich to begin making unlimited federal campaign donations. Since huge donations bring huge expectations, the needs of everyone else gradually faded in comparison.

Since CU, the legal interests of the powerful have prevailed consistently over the common man, to the point where today, Trump is stripping federal agencies bare to pay for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts to the rich. Trump/Musk are also strong-arming the world to advance their own oligarchic interests, in what The Economist calls Trump’s “Mafia-like struggle” for power.

It is no accident that JD Vance’s mentor oligarch openly seeks the dismantling of American democracy.The current oligarchs’ revolution will, if successful, dramatically rewrite or discard the Constitution. And they put their money where their mouths are: In 2010, super PACs spent $62.6 million on federal elections; in 2024, that figure surpassed $4.1 billion.

The compelling government interest in protecting democracy

SCOTUS found in CU that limiting political donations was a prohibited ban on free speech because “political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it, whether by design or inadvertence.” We have entered the terminus stage of that ruling, as political speech by the rich monopolizes all others, upending the very rationale behind CU. Not only has the logic of CU proved faulty, but House Republicans are preparing to impeach federal judges for blocking DOGE, bringing the dangers of CU full circle by aiming its destruction at the judiciary itself.

In its 5 to 4 ruling, the CU court examined the law limiting political expenditures under a “strict scrutiny” test. A strict scrutiny standard means the government must prove that the restriction furthers a “compelling governmental interest,” and is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest. The government argued in CU that its compelling interest in limiting political expenditures was to prevent wealth-and-power-skewed distortion, to avoid the “corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth” dictating the outcome of federal elections.

Striking the limits nonetheless, the court determined that the government’s justifications were “not compelling” enough because, on balance, the overall effect was to chill the political speech of corporations, organizations, and the wealthy, resulting in both speaker and viewpoint discrimination.

The problem with CU’s rationale is that, when applied in today’s media setting, it discriminates against the viewpoints of everyone else. When the world’s richest man spent $44 billion to purchase a social media platform to amplify his own political views, he chilled the free political speech of everyone else. Ditto when he spent an additional $288 million to get Trump elected, largely through disinformation. When Trump promised fossil fuel giants who donated $1 billion to his campaign that he would gut environmental laws as their payback, he chilled the free speech of everyone who depends on clean air and water but can’t pony up a cool billion.

As Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his dissent, CU represented “a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government.”

Musk is a walking posterboy for overturning CU

CU, in short, allowed Musk to purchase his co-presidency. Musk is now gutting agencies that previously regulated his corporate conduct; soon there will be no government agency left to regulate pollution by Space X, or to audit Starlink in Ukraine, or to check Musk’s plans to expand X into an “everything app” for banking and financial services.

Seeking to throw millions of federal workers into unemployment, Musk calls them “parasites,” undeserving recipients of government funding. By his own measure, however, Musk himself is the US’ biggest parasite, having received over $38 billion in subsidies, loans, contracts, and tax credits backed by the federal government. He used tax dollars to become the richest man in the world, and now seeks to cut the most basic services—including health care— for the little people who subsidized his way.

The fox is not just in the henhouse, he is building a fortress around it so he can eat every last hen without interference, starving fox colonies outside the fortress be damned.

We have reached the terminus stage under CU

That Republicans are too terrified to stop Trump, who is now aiding and giving comfort to the enemy,illustrates the danger in allowing outsize wealth to dictate the outcome of federal elections.

Despite Fox News’ claims to the contrary, this is the not the America we want or voted for, and it’s not the America our grandfathers fought for. CU has brought us to the end stage of a free democracy, as Trump deliberately inches the world closer to WWIII.

At a meeting last week with governors in the White House, Trump pointedly attacked Maine’s Gov. Janet Mills, threatening to cut Maine’s federal funding if she didn’t comply with his policies, prompting Mills to shoot back, “See you in court.” Trump, secure in the knowledge under CU that Musk’s money would defeat Mills in the next election, snapped, “Enjoy your life after governor, because I don’t think you’ll (ever) be in elected politics (again).”

If preserving our system of democratic governance isn’t a more compelling governmental interest than letting rich men control the debate, nothing is.

Sabrina Haake is a 25 year trial lawyer specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. Her columns are published in the Chicago Tribune, Salon, Raw Story, Out South Florida, Windy City Times, MSN, Alternet, and Smart News. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.