Corporations therefore increasingly used the dark-money loophole, more like a garage door, that Obama left open for them and even set into law that it must remain open. Yes, Citizens United created this opportunity for "dark money." But it was Obama who maintained the midnight delivery service and loading dock for influence peddling. The Court may have even been blindsided by Obama's unexpectedly resolute service to plutocrats in practice, contrary to his professed intentions.
Without Obama, we would be left with a Citizens United decision that granted a sliver more authority to corporations to spend all the money they want on elections, that vanishing sliver of difference between legalized sham issue ads and still illegal campaign ads. With Obama we now have a plague of dark money in politics, which had been illegal before Citizens United, and would have remained illegal had he acted as promised.
Obama widened this sliver even further, adding another whole loading dock for corrupt deliveries of policy, by failing to appoint FEC commissioners who would enforce the "independent spending" rules. By not enforcing the law, the problem created by Citizens United, but again delivered by Obama, grew much more virulent than it would have been if Obama had done his constitutional duty to take care that the law requiring actual "independence" was enforced. Obama's delivery service for plutocrats, in effect, allowed unlimited contributions to candidates, including of course his own "unprecedented amounts of large contributions and bundled contributions."
Take Obama out of the picture and put a Bernie Sanders in, get the laws for dark-money disclosure and for monitoring the independence of expenditures enforced, and Citizens United really amounts to very little. It would take away no significant power from plutocrats if they had to go back to relying on sham issue ads, and using their own, rather than their corporation's, money to cover that extra sliver of independent campaign advocacy that lie just beyond the legalized reach of sham issue ads.
But since Citizens United has been way overhyped by the liberal non-profit-industrial complex as if it were the Supreme Court's key money in politics decision, it made a useful bargaining chip for Bush to play in his effort to outflank Trump and the rest of the Republican field on this issue of political corruption. Striking out to "eliminate Citizens United" made for a loud soundbite hitting a virtually empty vessel.
2. Legalizing Obama.
The regime of non-enforcement that Obama established allows unlimited money from any source to flow, often anonymously, to candidates through their Super-PACs and other dark-money conduits. It's the wild west. Bush himself sent three fundraisers from his presidential campaign to work for his supposedly "independent" but definitely loaded SuperPac. This helps to avoid any slips in coordination of the spending of money from Bush's plutocrat friends with his campaign, while they feign independence. What's he complaining about? He can afford the lawyers to paper over the fraud. His and similar tricks for implicit coordination are routine for Clinton and the other candidates as well. They are technically illegal, but Obama's non-enforcement regime has allowed them to flourish anyway.
In exchange for giving up the vastly over-hyped but disappearingly small sliver of authority described above, "Bush has called for unlimited campaign contributions" instead. Campaign contributions directly to politicians and parties are formally limited. But those limits are now routinely circumvented in practice by the nominally independent expenditures system described above.
Bush's proposal would simply legalize this nominally illegal regime that Citizens United enabled but Obama has delivered by non-enforcement. Bush would eliminate the fake middleman SuperPAC, such as that where he placed his former campaign staff, and route the same money directly to the campaign and party. This would avoid the nuisance of maintaining a fake Chinese Wall to guard against the possibility that an overzealous prosecutor shows up who did not get Obama's impunity memo.
The current de facto Citizens United/Obama regime of unlimited contributions in the form of illegally coordinated "independent" expenditures would thereby be legalized. The distinction without a difference that Bush offers to justify this change to remove one the last remaining fig leafs from the fully corrupt US system of legalized bribery is that corporations would again be deprived of that pre-Citizens United sliver of difference by being limited to their sham issue ads, along with their employee PACs, overpaid CEO political investment conduits, and ownership or rental of mass media propaganda outlets.
3. The ConCon con.
In the fine print of his proposal, Bush also suggests how he would go about overturning Citizens United. He supports the Koch brothers' Constitutional Convention. He would use the cannon of this never-before-used provision of the Constitution for purposes of abolishing that sliver of authority granted by Citizens United to corporations. He mentions that while they are at it the ConCon could also enact ALEC's balanced-budget amendment, and who knows what other damage to the Constitution. There is no room here to go into detail, but this ConCon con has been justly criticized as the fastest way to get rid of the Constitution short of a military coup d'etat. Bush is using his Citizens United soundbite as a stalking horse for his plutocrat donors' fondest dream, a new fully plutocratic Constitution. It would be closer to current reality, minus all that democracy nonsense that only gives people dangerous ideas, while adding the bill of rights for capitalists that the framers overlooked.
(The author is currently writing a three-part book assessing proposals for ending the political influence of special interest money. The Supreme Court's plutocracy cases are discussed further in the current eLibrary draft of the first part, Hillary Clinton's Dark Money Disclosure "Pillar," available online).
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