Republicans have waged a decades-long battle to blow up the campaign-finance laws that rein in big-money spending. Now, they are making a play that could end in their biggest victory since the Citizens United ruling in 2010.
The GOP is growing increasingly optimistic about their prospects in a little-noticed lawsuit that would allow official party committees and candidates to coordinate freely by removing current spending restrictions. If successful, it would represent a seismic shift in how tens of millions of campaign dollars are spent and upend a well-established political ecosystem for TV advertising.
An eventual victory in the lawsuit, filed last November by the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee, would eliminate the need for House and Senate campaign committees of any party to set up separate operations to make so-called independent expenditures to boost candidates with TV ads.
The biggest issue here isn't even this campaign finance change.
The biggest issue is that once again Republicans push a decades-long battle.
Conservatives play the long game. They push their agenda for years and decades at a time until it starts to stick.
Liberals can't focus on one topic for more than a few weeks or months before they jump onto the next big travesty that they try (but usually fail) to solve. The Left has the attention plan of a goldfish.
There's a reason why RvW has been thrown out, gun laws are the loosest they've been in decades and campaign finance changes happen, while we still don't have universal healthcare, parental leave, mandatory minimum holidays, etc. One side can look at the big picture and plan their strategy over many, many years, while the other side is endlessly losing focus by jumping to some fake crisis after another and never accomplishing anything.