Nuked Gingrich, Part 12

So right-wing radio loudmouth Michael Savage offered Newt Gingrich a million bucks to drop out of the race.  We all ought to be much more concerned with the gentleman who just gave Newt twenty million to stay in, a Greg Sargent explains:

Politico weighed in today with a bombshell revelation: Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson is set to hand $20 million to a “Super PAC” backing Newt Gingrich. Such a sum could have a major impact on the GOP primary, enabling him to ward off the barrage of negative ads currently pummeling him daily — meaning that one extremely wealthy man could play an extraordinarily outsized role in helping decide the GOP nominee for president.

This prompted a good question from Taegan Goddard: “How on earth is this legal in American politics?” I checked in with David Donnelly of the Public Campaign Action Fund to get an answer.
It turns out there are scenarios under which this might not be legal. If someone who works directly for Gingrich’s campaign solicted this money in any way from Adelson, that would violate Federal laws that prohibit coordination between campaigns and super PACs.

But here’s the interesting twist: The scenario under which this is legal is, at bottom, not significantly different from having Gingrich’s campaign aides directly solicit such contributions.

Thanks to Citizens United and a subsequent court decision, Super PACs can raise unlimited sums, and spend it all advocating directly for or against a candidate, as long as there’s no coordination between the Super PAC and the candidate’s campaign. But this prohibition against coordination doesn’t really have much significance in the real world.

So yes, when the one percent drops $20 million in order to buy a race at a critical time, it's 100% legal because our Supreme Court has said our nation's most important resource when it comes to campaign speech is rich people who have tens of millions of bucks to give to people like Newt Gingrich on an idle Thursday.

Bought and paid for.