(p 290-291)
It "was really Jim [Bopp]'s brainchild," Richard L. Hasen, an expert of election law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles told The New York Times. "He has manufactured these cases to present certain questions to the Supreme Court in a certain order and achieve a certain result," said Hansen. "He is a litigation machine."
Bopp agreed. "We had a 10-year plan to take all this down," he told the Times. "And if we do it right, I think we can pretty well dismantle the entire regulatory regime that is called campaign finance law."
Such a statement would have seemed ludicrous just a few years earlier, and in fact, in the beginning, no one took Bopp seriously....At the time, he was literally laughed at by one federal judge. At the time, he was arguing that a hyperbolic film attacking Hillary Clinton, who was running for president, deserved the same First Amendment protection as newscasts aired by CBS's 60 Minutes. The film, a screed called Hillary: The Movie, had been produced by Citizens United, an old right-wing group with a history of making viscious campaign ads. The question, as the Supreme Court interpreted it, was whether Hillary: The Movie was a protected form of speech or a corporate political donation by its backers, which could be regulated as a campaign donation...
Thus Citizens United was cast as the right of corporations to exercise their free speech. As conservatives has hoped (p 292) the argument disarmed and divided the Left, even attracting the support of traditionally liberal champions of the First Amendment.
While polls consistently showed that large majorities of the American public -- both Republicans and Democrats -- favored strict spending limits, the key challenges that led to dismantling the laws were initiated by the extraordinarily rich majority: the Kochs and their clique of ultra-wealthy conservative activists.
(p 293)
In the view of the defenders, Citizens United and its progeny did not represent the black-and-white contrast of progressives' nightmares so much as it clarified grey areas. But this alone was extremely important. By flashing a green light, the Supreme Court sent a message to the wealthy and their political operatives that when it came to raising and spending money, they now would act with impunity. Both the legal fog and the political stigma lifted.
Soon, the sums pledged at the Koch donor summits began to soar from the $13 million that Sean Noble raised in June 2009 to nearly $900 million at a single fund-raising session in the years that followed.