To Potter, the focus even on a broader economic interest sets a corporation apart from a citizen. “I’m not an anti­corporate guy,” he hastened to tell me. But citizens have a very different approach to politics. “All of those indi­viduals have lots of calculations and lots of different interests at stake,” he said. “You look at something, and the range of your decisions is: Is this decision affected by my religion? By my moral values? By whether they’re going to raise or lower my taxes—whether I’m going to have more take-home pay? By whether the schooling is going to be better for my grand­children? By whether I think war is morally wrong? By whether I think we should be safeguarding our future in the Far East? All these sorts of questions are at play when an individual makes a political decision of who to support.” But, he added, “that’s not what a corporation does. It’s not what it’s supposed to do. It is supposed to figure out how to get more out of the government, how to get a policy that benefits it at the expense of its competitors.”

The majority in Citizens United implicitly endorsed a narrow, corporate approach to politics. In its hymn to the new era of disclosure, the majority noted: “Shareholders can determine whether their corporation’s political speech advances the corporation’s interest in making profits.” That is, shareholders can punish a company if it makes the mistake of politicking in ways that don’t bring it profit. It is hard not to read that as: For a corporation, political speech is commercial speech—and that this Court’s majority regards that as a good thing. (After all, corporations are the voices that “best represent the most significant segments of the economy.”) If that’s so, why can Congress ban direct corporate contributions to federal candidates, as it has since 1907? Jim Bopp has cases in the works to challenge the constitutionality of that restriction.

History’s pendulum is now swinging back toward the days when political finances were only lightly regulated, when the system was more open to the cacophonous participation that Jim Bopp loves, and more vulnerable to the corruption and capture that Trevor Potter fears. Reformers who have been around a long time are betting that an old political cycle will repeat itself—that a permissive era will produce a scandal that will produce new rules. “Look to history,” says Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21. “It’ll come from the American people. It’ll come from scandals. The history for me is the saving grace here, being old enough to have lived through this before.”

Maybe so. Maybe a big campaign-finance scandal will break the congressional logjam blocking the Disclose Act. And, short of achieving a new majority on the Supreme Court, there are levers that a reform-minded administration might pull. The FEC could write regulations ensuring true separation between the candidates’ campaigns and super pacs. (Obama may have pledged to change our politics, but he has shied away from seeking to replace the five FEC commissioners whose terms have expired, leaving the deadlocked incumbents in place.) Maybe, in the wake of a scandal, the IRS might move to tighten restrictions on the risible social-welfare nonprofits and the politicking trade associations. A scandal would surely put some political weight behind the innovative notions for public financing bubbling up from various cities and states. And having reversed itself once, the Supreme Court might do so again, though Bopp, from hard experience, calls that a “slender reed.” “Well, Roe v. Wade hasn’t been overturned, despite how many Republican presidents?” he said at one point, with some bitter­ness.