How did we get here?

WOLF: This is the second straight election in which the world’s richest man and a campaign superdonor has handed out million-dollar checks essentially to random people. How can this possibly be legal?

GHOSH: The moment that we’re in is the logical and unfortunate result of the culture of how elections are financed in this country that was unleashed by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision.

To start at the beginning, for nearly a century before Citizens United, the law on corporate expenditures in elections had not changed. For decades, the law hadn’t really changed in the most important respects, which included the idea that contribution limits served a vital purpose in limiting influence and potential corruption by any individual donor.

Citizens United and the wave of spending that decision unleashed fundamentally changed all that. What had once been a pretty clear and well-accepted prohibition that corporations cannot spend money on elections was blown away overnight.

In a second decision by the federal appellate court in DC called SpeechNow, the court said that groups that only spend money independently can raise unlimited amounts of money for election spending and can take money from corporations.

Those two decisions, both in 2010, completely changed the landscape of how elections are financed.

It took a few election cycles to really take hold. But what we see regularly now — and it’s not clear that we’ve plateaued at all — is record-breaking increases in the overall amount spent, and particularly the amount spent by these outside spending groups, which include super PACs as well as dark money groups that don’t disclose their donors.