Still, that was enough to set off a fierce Republican backlash—the Wall Street Journal editorial page fulminated against the proposal, and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by California Republican Darrell Issa, demanded the SEC turn over staff emails regarding the proposal. This, in turn, led to a remarkable and largely overlooked nine-page memo from Issa’s committee last July. The document alleged that Schapiro had agreed to add the disclosure rule to the agenda, against the misgivings of her staff, only as a result of pressure from Barney Frank and liberal groups like Public Citizen. “The inexplicable attention to political spending by tax-exempt organizations suggests that pressure from the House Democratic Leadership and special interest groups successfully influenced staff consideration of the issue,” the memo states. It goes on to connect the proposed rule to revelations that the IRS had given close scrutiny to Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status, decrying both as part of a “government-wide effort to stifle political speech.”

Frank scoffed when I asked him recently about the Issa memo. (He scoffed even at my calling it the “Issa memo,” saying it was surely written by staff, not the chairman himself, since Issa is “semi-literate.”) “For Darrell Issa of all people to suggest something inappropriate with a member of Congress pressuring an administrative agency to do things is as bizarre as it gets,” Frank said, noting that he was pushing to greatly increase the SEC’s budget even in the period when Schapiro was resisting the disclosure proposal. A spokeswoman for Issa, Becca Watkins, said he stood by the memo: “Our memo was a result of documentation and internal emails that showed the concern from the SEC that came out of professional staff,” she said.

For all the Sturm und Drang, little progress had been made on the proposal by the time Schapiro stepped down at the end of 2012. And when it came time for White’s confirmation as her replacement, Republican fury had not abated. Pressed on whether she would stick with the idea, White was noncommittal. But in November, she quietly dropped it from the agenda, with an SEC spokesman suggesting the agency had too much else on its plate, notably the rulemaking for the Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

The proposal’s supporters are still smarting from her decision. They scoff at the claim by some SEC officials that the issue should be left to the FEC and IRS, noting that the former is utterly dysfunctional and the latter is hamstrung by the investigations into its handling of Tea Party groups. “I was very disappointed,” says Frank. “I cannot think of a single reason why corporate executives ought to be able to spend shareholder money for political purposes and keep it secret.” Kent Greenfield, a Boston College law professor, calls corporate disclosure the “obvious response” to Citizens United. “Even if corporations are citizens, which is what Justice [Anthony] Kennedy said they were, the mother’s milk of corporate accountability when it comes to money as speech has to be information,” he said. “Most political spending [by corporations] is essentially self-dealing by executives, and if you have hundreds of millions of dollars of self-dealing by executives, it’s squarely in the SEC’s purview to do something about it.”