WASHINGTON, DC — The conservative justices justified their decision in Citizens United that corporations and wealthy individuals can spend unlimited money to influence elections because they believe that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” They are part of a very small minority who believes this. Only 15 percent of the country believes that unlimited spending does not lead to corruption, less than the 19 percent who believe in “spells or witchcraft.”

In an exclusive interview with ThinkProgress yesterday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) argued that the five conservatives responsible for Citizens United would never have made such an error in judgment if they had actually had first-hand knowledge of how elections work:

Unfortunately you had the five right-wing judges, none of whom have ever run for any office ever and have zero political experience between the five of them, offering opinions about what money can do in elections . . . . So clearly the finding of fact in Citizens United that unlimited corporate spending cannot either increase the risk of corruption or increase the appearance to the public that there’s corruption is ludicrous. . . . .

The President asked me who I thought, you know, what were the characteristics of somebody that should be appointed to the Court, and I said I think it should be somebody who has some actual political experience out there so that they are not operating in this political arena with absolutely no knowledge. Even if they wanted to come to the result that Citizens United came to, I think those judges would have had a hard time getting there if they’d had actual practical political experience because they would have known what a preposterous finding they were making.

Watch it:

The current Supreme Court includes eight former U.S. Court of Appeals judges and one former law school dean. Four of the five current justices responsible for Citizens United served as political appointees in Republican administrations. The justices who decided Brown v. Board of Education, by contrast, included one former governor, three former U.S. senators, and one former state lawmaker.

The Supreme Court will have the opportunity to correct its error in Citizens United, however, in a pending case challenging Montana’s longstanding ban on corporate influence over elections. Sen. Whitehouse joined Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in a brief urging the justices to “revisit Citizens United‘s finding that vast independent expenditures do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption” if they agree to hear the Montana case.

Twenty-two states joined an amicus brief that will be filed today in the Supreme Court by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) calling for the Supreme Court to back off its election-buying decision in Citizens United. The brief, which supports the state of Montana’s effort to preserve its ban on corporate money in elections, argues that state elections present an even greater risk than federal elections of being corrupted by corporate money — and thus states should be allowed to restrict such money even if the justice cling to their idiosyncratic belief that federal bans on corporate election spending are unconstitutional.

Sadly, the states’ brief only highlights the partisan impact of Citizens United. Of the 22 states that joined the brief, only three — Idaho, Washington and Utah — have Republican attorneys general. Additionally, top Republican elected officials and lobbying organizations, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, previously filed briefs calling for the justices to redouble their commitment to corporate influence on elections.

The GOP’s loyalty to Citizens United is disappointing, but it is not surprising. As ThinkProgress previously explained, Citizens United succeeded in transforming a moderate election spending advantage for Democrats into a massive advantage for Republicans:

Yet, while Citizens United enjoys strong support among Republican officials (and among the five Republican justices responsible for it), few Americans share this view. According to a recent Brennan Center poll, only 15 percent of respondents agree with the core of Citizens United‘s reasoning, that allowing wealthy corporations and individuals to spend unlimited money trying to influence elections will not lead to corruption — four percent fewer than believe in “spells or witchcraft” according to a different poll.

Our Guest Blogger is Amy Rosenbaum, a Senior Fellow with the Center for American Progress Action Fund

Last night, a three judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit rejected a stay of a district court ruling on March 30, 2012, which essentially required groups running so-called “electioneering communications” ads to begin disclosing the donors who funded the ads. The original ruling, by Judge Amy Berman Jackson, struck down a Federal Election Commission (FEC) regulation that permitted groups to all but eliminate the disclosure of donors behind “electioneering communications.” A briefing on the appeal of the ruling at the DC Circuit Court of Appeals is scheduled to be completed by early August and the oral arguments are expected sometime in September.

Why is this case a win for disclosure?

Prior to the March 30th ruling, any group running an “electioneering communication,” or a broadcast advertisement that refers to a clearly identified federal candidate proximate to an election, generally did not have to disclose the funders of that advertisement, thanks to regulations promulgated by the FEC in violation of the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA). As a result, groups like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS spent more than $1 million on broadcast advertisements during the last election cycle without revealing a single donor.

Recently, Crossroads GPS notified the FEC that it spent $500,000 on electioneering communications advertisements targeting President Obama in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, and Missouri, again without disclosing a single donor. The Crossroads GPS ad blames President Obama for the Solyndra bankruptcy, among other things. According to their tax returns, Crossroads GPS received two $10 million donations between June 1, 2010 and the end of 2011, but the identity of these donors has remained a secret, even though their money has been funneled into campaign advertisements.

Thanks to last night’s ruling, groups like Crossroads GPS making electioneering communications 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election will now have to disclose their donors. These groups will either have to set up a separate bank account to fund their ads – and disclose all the donors of $1,000 or more to that account or alternatively disclose all the donors of $1,000 or more to their organization.

So if Crossroads GPS goes after the President again in September, we’ll know who’s really behind the ads. And that is a win for disclosure.

That is, of course, unless the court reverses the lower court when it convenes to give the case a full hearing later this year. Although a majority of the three judge panel that considered whether to grant the stay rejected this plea, Judge Karen Henderson dissented from this rulling. The D.C. Circuit is notoriously conservative, and has several judges who are at least as far to the right as Henderson, so it remains to be seen whether last night’s decision has staying power.

Over at the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin has a lengthy and excellent piece recounting the history the Supreme Court’s election-buying decision in Citizens United. Toobin frames the piece at the tale of conservative Chief Justice John Roberts’ strategic triumph over more than a hundred years of regulation limiting big money’s influence on politics. Nevertheless, the most important revelation in Toobin’s piece is the central role the Supreme Court’s so-called moderate swing vote played in dismantling meaningful limits on wealthy interest groups’ influence on elections:

According to the briefs in the case—and Olson’s argument—the main issue was whether the McCain-Feingold law applied to a documentary, presented on video on demand, by a nonprofit corporation. The liberals lost that argument: the vote at the conference was that the law did not apply to Citizens United, which was free to advertise and run its documentary as it saw fit. The liberals expected that Roberts’s opinion would say this much and no more.

At first, Roberts did write an opinion roughly along those lines, and Kennedy wrote a concurrence which said the Court should have gone much further. Kennedy’s opinion said the Court should declare McCain-Feingold’s restrictions unconstitutional, overturn an earlier Supreme Court decision from 1990, and gut long-standing prohibitions on corporate giving. But after the Roberts and Kennedy drafts circulated, the conservative Justices began rallying to Kennedy’s more expansive resolution of the case. In light of this, Roberts withdrew his own opinion and let Kennedy write for the majority. Kennedy then turned his concurrence into an opinion for the Court.

The new majority opinion transformed Citizens United into a vehicle for rewriting decades of constitutional law in a case where the lawyer had not even raised those issues.

As ThinkProgress previously explained, Kennedy is widely viewed as a moderate conservative, but this perception is inaccurate. Although Kennedy does sometimes deviate from conservative orthodoxy on social or on criminal justice issues, he is a hard line conservative on economic justice. Kennedy is a zealous supporter of forced arbitration, a practice that allows corporations to force their workers and consumers into a privatized arbitration system that overwhelmingly favors corporate parties. He cast the key vote against Lilly Ledbetter and against equal pay for many women in the workplace. He cast the key fifth vote empowering corporations to immunize themselves from consumer class actions. And, of course, he also voted to install install George W. Bush as president.

If you feel like you’ve seen an exceptional number of negative campaign ads — think black and white images, booming voices, and terrifying statistics — you aren’t alone. It turns out that this year’s presidential campaign season has been the most negative on record with 70 percent negative ads, according to a new Wesleyan Media Project study.

But it isn’t the candidates alone who are suddenly flinging mud. While the use of negative ads by the candidates has spiked (it was 8.6 percent in 2008, and it’s 52.5 percent this time around), the bigger change is in outside group’s campaigns, which have grown enormously according to Erika Franklin Fowler, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project:

One reason the campaign has been so negative is the skyrocketing involvement of interest groups, who have increased their activity by 1100 percent over four years ago… But we cannot attribute the negativity solely to outside groups. Even the candidates’ own campaigns have taken a dramatic negative turn.

There’s a big reason for the increased involvement, and that’s Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that said outside groups can spend an unlimited amount of money on campaigns as long as they don’t “coordinate” with the candidate. That decision led to the advent of Super PACs, groups whose sole purpose it to spend money attacking their opponents and lauding the candidates they support. The results of the Super PAC campaign era are clear: In 2008, only 25.2 percent of outside group ads were negative — but today, 86 percent are.