This is the Cater Daily podcast for Tuesday, January 14, 2025.

I'm Caleb Brown.

You may notice a relative silence about so-called dark money spending in elections.

That may be because in the last presidential election, the losing party and its advocates outspent the winning party

and its advocates by a fairly sizable margin. So what's next for the attempts to regulate

average people voicing their electoral preferences effectively? Nick Wacup is with people

united for privacy. He says to be on the lookout for more Republicans backing away from free speech

commitments in favor of squelching electoral speech.

This phrase is thrown around a lot, dark money. And it doesn't have a super clear meaning to most people.

I mean, you hear dark money and you think, oh, this is unlimited contributions from the former Soviet Union, from China, from oligarchs around the world.

What does dark money, as it's used in the news media? I mean,

it's a loaded term, to be clear. What does it mean? That is a question everyone should ask

themselves whenever they encounter that term in media coverage. Because a lot of times it

means different things when different people use it. It is not a technical or a legal term.

It's a pejorative that was popularized after the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that unions and

corporations, including non-profit corporations, such as the ACLU, NRA, Planned Parenthood, groups like that,

the court ruled that those groups have a First

Amendment right to express their support or opposition to candidates for office.

And these groups, because they are not candidate campaign committees, they're not political

action committees, they're not required to disclose all of their donors because their primary

purpose is not campaign activity.

So you have critics of these groups claiming that, you know, so-called dark money is a political

...