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A legal war has been waged since the campaign finance reforms that followed the Watergate scandals, when Congress passed the bedrock for our modern money-in-politics regulatory regime. And while reformers have notched significant victories, deep-pocketed deregulators have slowly chipped away at major provisions by challenging them all the way to the Supreme Court. Here’s a look at how we got here, to a system where unlimited and often undisclosed cash is used to directly influence modern elections.


John Dunbar worked for 15 years at the Center for Public Integrity, serving as its CEO from 2016 to 2018.