Here’s a very interesting piece wrote by Matt Bai in the New York Times magazine section.
“How Much Has Citizens United Changed the Political Game?”
Citizens United and a couple of related court decisions changed all of this in two essential ways (…) First, the Supreme Court wiped away much of the rigmarole about “express advocacy” and “electioneering.” Now any outside group can use corporate money to make a direct case for who deserves your vote and why, and they can do so right up to Election Day. The second change is that the old 527s have now been made effectively obsolete, replaced by the super PAC. The main difference between a super PAC and a social-welfare group, practically speaking, is that a super PAC has to disclose the identity of its donors, while social-welfare groups generally do not.
