Portside

Successive High Court decisions have done more than enfranchise corporations at the expense of the rest of us. The same logic in the same cases now defines public corruption down: that a direct and palpable quid pro quo must be seen to operate. Absent that smoking gun, the financial elite has no limits on bankrolling campaigns whose candidates then vote their interests. To the nation's founders, that untrammeled influence was the essence of public corruption.