But if billionaires are not necessarily tilting power to one party or another, they do hold enormous sway over the two-party system in general. And that goes back to Buckley.

“If those justices had been aware then of what we now face, my guess is that we would have had the opposite result,” said Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago and co-editor of a new book of Buckley scholarship. “They weren’t imagining the current world.”

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