Protesters call for a reversal of the Citizens United decision outside the Supreme Court. PHOTOGRAPH BY MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GETTY

If you’re like me, you haven’t decided how you’re going to mark this week’s fifth anniversary of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court case that brought you the super PAC. The Court itself will honor the occasion by hearing another campaign-finance case, this one concerning judicial elections. Perhaps the Justices, at Tuesday’s oral argument in Williams-Yulee v. Florida Bar, will also observe a moment of silence for the post-Watergate system of limits, curbs, and checks. It’s not dead yet—not entirely—but it is experiencing what health professionals call “end-of-life issues,” and this might be the time for the country to ask itself some tough questions.

The Roberts Court’s deregulation of campaign finance—one of the principal projects of the court’s conservative justices—is rolling along with merciless efficiency. Campaign-finance reform is on a losing streak of seven cases, each decided by the same 5–4 margin. The effects are more apparent with every election cycle. A new study released by the Brennan Center for Justice, at New York University, reveals that in Senate races since 2010, the volumes of both outside spending and “dark money” (expenditures by groups that are not required to disclose their donor lists) have more than doubled. A “tiny sliver of mega-donors,” the report says, funnels money through super PACs and tax-exempt, so-called social-welfare organizations. The cascade of cash is affecting every level of government—not just federal elections but races for governor, mayor, attorney general, district attorney, city council, and judge. Money has been present in politics for a long time, but thanks to this Court there is a great deal more of it, and it is making elections uglier affairs; in 2014, ads produced by independent groups were markedly more negative than ads made by candidates who “approve this message.”

Lanell Williams-Yulee, whose case the Court will hear on Tuesday, ran for Hillsborough County Court Judge in 2009. By asking supporters, in a mass mailing, to make “an early contribution” to her campaign, she ran afoul of the Florida Code of Judicial Conduct, which forbids candidates from soliciting campaign funds directly. Florida is one of thirty states requiring that requests for contributions be made through a campaign committee—removing judicial candidates, if only by degrees, from the distasteful and possibly compromising act of putting their palms out. The Florida Bar fined Williams-Yulee (who lost the election in a landslide) about eighteen hundred dollars. Yet her claim that the ban violates her First Amendment rights seems likely to find a favorable audience among the Court’s conservatives.

It’s true that in 2009, in Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co., Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the Supreme Court’s liberals in requiring a West Virginia Supreme Court justice to recuse himself from a case in which the defendant’s C.E.O. had spent three million dollars to get the judge elected. The decision showed at least some solicitude for judicial independence in the face of all that campaign money. Yet Kennedy, in the majority opinion, took pains to stress that the facts in this case were “extreme,” and less than a year later, in Citizens United, he made the blithe assertion that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” Indeed, he took it even further: “The appearance of influence or access,” he added, “will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy.” This, as any legal scholar will recognize, is the doctrine of willful naïveté, a central element in all of the Roberts Court’s campaign-finance rulings.

Corruption and its confederates—influence and access—are, of course, exactly what campaign-finance laws aim to prevent, in the name of a functioning democracy. Concern about preventing corruption—not just of individuals but of political institutions—goes back to the nation’s founding: Hamilton, in The Federalist No. 22, foresaw that “in republics, persons elevated from the mass of the community by the suffrages of their fellow-citizens to stations of great pre-eminence and power may find compensations for betraying their trust.” By “compensations,” Hamilton meant more than just bribery. But what the Roberts Court has done, with great determination, is to restrict the definition of corruption—to suggest, in effect, that money cannot possibly have a corrupting effect on our politics unless it is neatly stacked in bundles of unmarked Ben Franklins and handed to a government official in exchange for a no-bid contract.

Whatever the outcome of Williams-Yulee, the conservative Justices will have other opportunities to extend this line of reasoning. The decades-old ban on corporate and union contributions to candidates, the cap on individual contributions to candidates and parties, the public financing of elections—these and other regulations are still standing, albeit in the manner of a woodland animal that has stepped into the H.O.V. lane. It is no wonder that campaign-finance reformers, while working to preserve what remains of the old system, are looking beyond any given case. Recently the Brennan Center hosted a conference with the title, “Money in Politics 2030: Toward a New Jurisprudence.” The organizers urged lawyers, scholars, and activists to begin “a fundamental rethinking of the constitutional framework for regulating money in politics.”

One attendee told me, reasonably enough, that 2030 might be a little optimistic. Still, the process has begun, in a scattershot sort of way. Some progressives are advocating executive action—I.R.S. and S.E.C. rule-making, for example—as a means of mandating disclosure and shining a little light on that dark money. Some are drafting anti-corruption legislation that could, they believe, survive a challenge before the Roberts Court. (Whether it could pass the Republican Congress is another question.) Others, meanwhile, are looking for alternatives to Buckley v. Valeo—the landmark 1976 decision that equated spending with speech and established the basis for the current system, which treats campaign expenditures and contributions differently. “Buckley is a rotten tree,” the N.Y.U. law professor Burt Neuborne told the Brennan conference. The justices “know it’s wrong, they know it’s intellectually indefensible, and my sense is reformers should be zeroing in on pushing Buckley over.” How to replace that precedent—and how to square the First Amendment, as it is popularly understood, with meaningful limits on money in politics—remains an open, and vexing, question for lawyers and policymakers.

Not all reformers subscribe to these efforts. One constitutional lawyer (who asked not to be identified because he has a case before the Court) told me, “We have all the arguments we need; we just don’t have the Court we need.” There is a certain truth to this: in case after case concerning campaign finance, the four dissenters have met the majority’s arguments with clarity and force. The liberals might be outnumbered, but they do not seem outmatched. Nick Penniman, the executive director of Issue One, a non-partisan group focussed on money in politics, predicts that if the Court’s balance shifts to the left, its rulings on campaign finance would “snap back hard.”

Even so, as Penniman acknowledges, this is more than a matter of reversing one bad decision, or seven of them. Undoing the damage is going to take time. The Court has not only knocked down a lot of campaign-finance laws, it has eroded the legal and intellectual foundation on which they once stood. Paul Smith, a leading Supreme Court lawyer has told progressives to steel themselves for a “long slow process of whittling away at the body of jurisprudence that exists now.” Nor is that all. Rebuilding—and reconceiving—the system of regulating campaign finance will require the effort of all three branches of government. Congress will have to pass new legislation; the executive branch will have to develop new rules; and then, once those regulations have been challenged, the judiciary will have to decide whether to sustain them, and, if so, on what basis. However long it might take to fell a rotten tree, planting a new one could take a while longer.