[yencabulator]

In actual functioning democracies political donations are capped severely.

Say, a single donor can contribute a maximum of €6,000 per parliament candidate per election.

Yes, that's a real limit.

[kelnos]

We used to have laws like that, but apparently our supreme court believes that bribing politicians is political speech, and curtailing that speech is unconstitutional, so...

It's so broken.

[apparent]

Are you aware that the Citizens United case was actually about a movie? It wasn't about handing someone a stack of cash. When I see perspectives like yours, I wonder what you would say is the right way to handle the question of whether someone can make a movie that portrays a candidate in a positive or negative light. It seems to be pretty clearly a matter of free speech (first amendment), so unless there's some other provision of the constitution that would override that, I don't see how it could be forbidden.

To the extent that a pretty big chunk of donations are used to fund very short movies (we call them ads) for or against candidates, I'm not sure how that can be distinguished. I could see how one would distinguish get-out-the-vote or other similar non-speech type activities, but those on the Left seem to not oppose such expenditures.

[heavyset_go]

Citizens United assured that will never happen in the US, and everything critics said about it 16 years ago has come into fruition and more.

[mikeyouse]

Roberts will certainly go down as the most consequential Chief Justice in several generations… the havoc he’s wrought is just remarkable.

[Nevermark]

Except for clusters of highly correlated private interest groups. PACs. Which completely circumvent that.

Ideally they "shouldn't". But in practice they do.

Because the Supreme Court determined that money is free speech, its use in elections cannot be limited in general.

And where coordination between purportedly independent groups isn't supposed to happen, there is a strong "don't ask, don't tell" code, and a mountain of lawyers ready to scream "political oppression!" on the dime of the rich.