Restoring Election Integrity
Floor Speech
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Ms. TOKUDA. Mr. Speaker, today marks the anniversary of Citizens United. This decision did not rewrite campaign finance law; it sold our democracy to the highest bidder.
Before Citizens United, elections were about persuading voters. After it, they became about courting billionaires.
As of 2025, there are 2,502 super-PACs. For the 2024 election, they have taken in over $5 billion, much of it dark money, much of it undisclosed, and much of it designed to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.
Let's be clear: This isn't free speech. This is legalized corruption.
Super-PACs were supposedly independent. In reality, they have become shadow campaigns, circumventing coordination laws, allowing unlimited, often anonymous, contributions, and turning elections into auctions.
What does that buy? For a bargain price of $300 million, Elon Musk bought a gilded seat inside the Federal Government and walked away with billions in contracts from the very agencies he later DOGE'd. It is a parasitic, pay-to-play system disguised as innovation.
Meanwhile, teachers, nurses, construction workers, and police officers pay higher effective tax rates than private equity executives. Families struggle with housing costs, healthcare, and childcare while Congress stalls, paralyzed by fear of angering the super-PACs that bankroll campaigns.
That fear is the point. Dark money doesn't just influence policy. It changes behavior. It makes Members of Congress think twice before doing the right thing because they know one vote could trigger a massive smear campaign.
The losers aren't Democrats or Republicans. The losers in all of this are the American people, across parties and across States, whose voices are being drowned out.
Fifteen years later, the verdict is in: Citizens United has sold out our democracy and all Americans across the country. It is past time to end the era when billionaires buy access, buy silence, and buy power.
Congress must act to close the coordination loopholes, rein in the super-PACs, and restore the simple idea that in America, people, not money, govern.
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