If you're interested in dark money, how it will influence 2016, and what forces converged to promise that 2016 will be an unprecedented election with unprecedented Billionaire Bucks™, I'd like to invite you to read my article over at the Washington Spectator. Voter suppression, undisclosed donors, and IRS intimidation are all part of the 2016 Republican strategy.

Here's the intro:

In the United States, money spent on candidates, politics, or public policy is protected speech under the First Amendment. What happens when protected speech is wrapped in a cloak of secrecy?

How to reconcile Citizens United, which gave corporations the same rights as individuals with regard to political speech while shielding them for any accountability for that speech?

This is the story of how one government agency struggled with these questions and how it was defanged before it could implement rules to force nonprofit organizations who are spending on political campaigns to disclose donors.

It is also a story about the unbridled freedom given to political nonprofits in the absence of campaign-finance laws or Internal Revenue Service rules regulating disclosure.

Read the rest.

And thanks for your support. I'll just take a moment and point of personal privilege here and recommend you subscribe to the publication, too. Everything I've read there has been first-rate if I do say so myself.