With more than $5 billion spent on all races, the 2018 midterms were the most expensive in history. This had many on the left up in arms and promising reform. A group of 100 Democratic candidates signed a pledge promising new limits on campaign spending by “big donors” and “special interests” if elected. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the new darling of the left, went even further. She called for a constitutional amendment to restrict the First Amendment and counteract the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, which allowed large political action committees known as super PACs to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on independent political speech.

Ocasio Cortez is in many ways a fringe candidate, but Democrats of all stripes share her animus against Citizens United and super PACs. In fact, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders promised to nominate Supreme Court justices who would overturn Citizens United if elected. The obsession by people on the left with clearing the airwaves of campaign advertisements funded by super PACs is misguided. Super PACs are simply associations of individuals who think alike and want to engage in political speech independent of candidates and political parties.

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As law professors Samuel Issacharoff and Pamela Karlan wrote, it does not take someone like Albert Einstein to discern a “first law of political thermodynamics” that the “desire for political power cannot be destroyed” but rather at most channeled into different forms. Indeed, this law has been at work since the beginning of campaign finance reform.