When discussing corruption in the Trump era, it’s easy to focus on the most flagrant examples. The Trump Organization announced last week that it plans to sell its infamous D.C. hotel, which gave businesses and foreign governments seeking the White House’s favor a high-profile mechanism to funnel cash into the Trump family’s coffers. Subtlety has never been their strong suit. “People are objecting to us making so much money on the hotel, and therefore we may be willing to sell,” Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons, told The New York Times.

Easier to miss are the more innocuous and pedestrian ways that money—especially large sums of it—shapes American politics. Over the past 15 years, the Supreme Court has aggressively struck down campaign-finance regulations on First Amendment grounds. The system they’ve carved out of Congress’s efforts to constrain public corruption rests upon a series of assumptions that have proven laughable.

Joe Biden’s presidential campaign is experiencing a cash crunch of sorts, with only $9 million in the bank as of last month’s filing report. Some of the vice president’s rivals, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, rely on broad pools of small-money donors who can chip in on a regular basis without hitting the $2,800 federal donation limit. Biden, on the other hand, is more reliant on donors who have already contributed the maximum legal amount to his campaign. That helped him build a substantial war chest when he entered the race six months ago, but has narrowed the opportunities to replenish it.

His campaign’s most recent solution to these money woes was the creation of a super PAC. Federal law limits the amount of money that individual donors can give to a campaign, as well as to how much can be given to party organizations and traditional political action committees. But donors face no such restrictions when giving money to super PACs. There’s a catch, however: Candidates and super PACs are not allowed to “coordinate” their activities, lest that coordination become a means to skirt federal donation limits. The Supreme Court first articulated this divide in the 1974 case Buckley v. Valeo when it struck down federal limits on “independent expenditures,” concluding that the lack of coordination reduced the risk of quid pro quo corruption.

In other words, Biden and his campaign staff can’t create a super PAC themselves or personally ask donors to fund one. They are, however, permitted to take the steps the Biden campaign took last month: reveal to reporters that they’ve dropped their opposition to super PACs and let news outlets publicize that information. As expected, a group of longtime Biden allies quickly organized a super PAC named Unite the Country and began using the funds they accrued to push back against Trump’s attacks. And while these activities are technically independent, they are unabashedly pro-Biden. Larry Rasky, the group’s treasurer, told Fox News that Unite the Country will “do our best to try and level the playing field and to use whatever is in the arsenal to take on lies and defend Biden’s record.”