Once again, we get to invoke the words of Anthony (Weathervane) Kennedy, who assured us that the new age of legalized influence-peddling was nothing really to worry about.

"Independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption."

Thus reassured, let's meet Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund buccaneer who's bankrolling the presidential campaign of Tailgunner Ted Cruz. The Tailgunner goes out to Iowa to scare the bejesus out of some poor, homeschooled children, while Mercer writes the checks, pays the bills, and piles up the IOU's. And there isn't even the appearance of quid pro quo corruption.

"It just takes a random billionaire to change a race and maybe change the country," Mr. Potter said. "That's what's so radically different now."

I have tried for five minutes now to write a sentence that does not contain the words "puppet," "marionette," or "greedy no-account bastards." I have failed in this regard.



Mr. Mercer does not have the name recognition of fellow Republican financiers like the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson, but he has spent more than $15 million since 2012 in support of conservative political campaigns and causes, donating to a number of candidates who had never even met him. Both moderate Republican candidates and Democrats in states like Iowa, New York and Oregon have found themselves in the cross hairs of expensive attack ads that he financed.

Lovely, because if there's one thing the country needs more than Ted Cruz's running for president, it's Ted Cruz's running for president with an even nastier guy pulling the strings.

Renaissance was also able to increase returns by borrowing large sums of money, but the practice eventually caught the attention of Washington and government agencies. Last year the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations accused Renaissance of using complex financial structures that allowed it to underestimate how much it owed the Internal Revenue Service by $6 billion. Taxpayers "had to shoulder the tax burden these hedge funds shrugged off with the aid of the banks," Senator Carl Levin of Michigan said at a hearing last summer. The I.R.S. has been investigating Renaissance for at least six years. A spokesman for the firm said its tax practices were legal and appropriate.

Of course, it's all tangled up with the people who wrecked the economy and then stole the pieces.

As federal agents pored over its books, Renaissance launched a political offensive. The company, which had been doing very little lobbying, spent $240,000 lobbying in 2010. The following year, it spent $740,000, almost all of it advocating on tax issues. Renaissance executives and directors were also pumping money into campaigns. In 2010, Mercer—a staunch conservative who helped finance the opposition to the Islamic center near Ground Zero—gave $200,000 to fund attack ads against Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), who had sponsored bills to tax derivatives and high-frequency trading. During the 2012 election cycle, Mercer gave $5.5 million to Republican candidates and outside groups, including Karl Rove's American Crossroads ($2 million) and Restore Our Future ($1 million), a super-PAC that backed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. He also pumped nearly $1 million into a super-PAC that aimed to defeat Rep. Timothy Bishop (D-N.Y.), a former SEC prosecutor who had prosecuted white-collar fraud.

Other guys at the same firm larded up some pro-Democratic superPAC's with similar fat checks, which might explain why we looked forward and not back. Now, of course, we discover that we didn't look far enough forward, and that Anthony Kennedy has never spent an hour in the real world.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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