Alfredo over at the Dairy Queen wrote this.  I couldn’t improve on it.

Ten years ago the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. FEC fundamentally changed the way American elections are funded when it found that corporations, unions and individuals could spend unlimited amounts to make independent expenditures to support or oppose candidates.  The D.C. Circuit then found in SpeechNow.org v. FEC that political committees could be created that could also accept unlimited amounts from corporations, unions and individuals as long as these committees only made independent expenditures and did not make contributions to candidates.  The technical term for these political committees is independent expenditure-only committees, but they were immediately dubbed Super PACs.

The cases giving rise to the Super PACs were premised on majority’s belief that campaigns and Super PACs would indeed act independently of one another and that the FEC would aggressively enforce the separation required by Citizens United and SpeechNow.

Ten years later the FEC finally did – but only because it had been presented with irrefutable evidence of coordination between a presidential campaign and a Super PAC.

The FEC just announced that it has fined the Cruz for President campaign $13,000 because a campaign fundraiser illegally solicited contributions to a Super PAC supporting Cruz’s election.

How was the FEC able to prove that a fundraiser for the Cruz for President campaign illegally solicited contributions to his designated Super PAC?

Someone who attended the Dallas fundraiser recorded the event and then posted it on You Tube.

Click here and see footnote 5 and accompanying text.

Listen carefully boys and girls – this is how campaign finance works in the real world.

The Cruz campaign held a joint fundraising event with two tables – one table where you could make a contribution to the Cruz campaign and a separate table where you could make a contribution to the Super PAC.

This was not an anomaly.  These joint fundraisers happen all the time.  There will be many this holiday weekend.

This is how our campaign finance system works ten years after Citizens United.  Super PACs are now created to support candidate at every level – down to local school board elections.  Many of these Super PACs are fully funded by relatives of the candidates – parents, brothers, sisters and even in one case the candidate’s spouse. Complaints were filed against all of these family Super PACs and the FEC turned a blind eye in every case, willing, instead, to believe the legal fiction that Super PACs are operated independently of campaigns.

The problem with legal fictions is . . . they’re fiction.

The FEC would probably have deadlocked in MUR 7048 with at least two commissioners willing to accept the Cruz’s campaign’s argument that the fundraiser really didn’t meet the definition of an “agent” of the campaign.

Except for that You Tube video.

That You Tube video exposed the liability of the Cruz campaign . . . and the fallacy of Citizens United.