Justice John Roberts, in his decision for the majority in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, said that there was a difference between the “quid pro quo corruption” of someone buying off a politician and “the general gratitude a candidate may feel toward those who support him or his allies, or the political access such support may afford.” It’s a distinction that can, at times, feel like a fine one. In light of McCutcheon, it’s worth taking a look at the forms that access can take; as it happens, there was an illustrative scene last week at the Venetian Hotel, in Las Vegas.

When would-be Republican candidates for President paraded at a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition, also known as the “Sheldon primary,” at the Venetian Hotel—“kissing the ring” of Sheldon Adelson, the eighty-year-old billionaire who spent ninety-three million dollars in 2012 trying to prevent Barack Obama from being reëlected—most of the discussion was about where each politician stood in Adelson’s eyes. The bigger, neglected question, though, is what Adelson, a casino magnate whose company, Las Vegas Sands Corporation, is currently under investigation by two federal agencies, means to buy with his money. He has told Politico that all he wants is two potato pancakes at the White House Hanukkah party, because “the last time I was there [under President George W. Bush], they ran out of … latkes.”

But there are things that Adelson cares about besides latkes. One is Israel. Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor, made news in Las Vegas when he said, “I took a helicopter ride from the occupied territories across and just felt personally how extraordinary that was, to understand the military risk that Israel faces every day.” The phrase “occupied territories” is the same term that even a pro-Israel President like Bush and at least some of the Israeli establishment employ. (“One may not like the word, but what is happening here is occupation. To hold three and a half million Palestinians under occupation, in my mind, is bad for Israel, also for the Palestinians, also for Israel’s economy”—that was Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in 2003.) And yet Christie, who intends to run for President based on his reputation for tough-guy candor and a refusal to back down, privately acknowledged to Adelson that he “misspoke,” and that his words were “not meant to be a statement of policy.” Presumably, Christie meant to signal that his policy, if he is elected President, like that of the other potential candidates in attendance, would be more in accord with that of their generous host. Adelson is well to the right of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and has largely rejected a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem.

One word was strangely unemphasized at the Venetian: Obamacare. Perhaps the aspirants or their staffs had seen a 2012 Wall Street Journal interview in which Adelson, who is married to an Israeli physician, said, “Look, I’m basically a social liberal,” and explained that he favored “a socialized-like health care” and opposed Obamacare only because “it’s making [medical] decisions based upon money,” rather than offering full “cradle to grave” coverage, as exists in Israel.

Fortunately for Republicans, social issues are far down Adelson’s list of priorities, below not just Israel but unapologetic union-busting and other initiatives that might help his businesses. His net worth of forty billion dollars is largely tied up in the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, which does ninety per cent of its business in casinos in Macao and Singapore. Under current law, Adelson’s company pays low taxes on overseas profits, and rates would skyrocket under a repatriation plan favored by Obama. He is also determined, according to USA Today, to “spend whatever it takes” to defeat efforts to legalize Internet gambling (currently allowed only in Nevada, New Jersey, and Delaware), an issue on which his stated moral objections—the ease with which minors can gamble online—happen to coincide with his casino interests.

Adelson is also angry about two pending federal investigations of his company that he believes are unwarranted. After Lockheed and several other U.S. corporations were found to be making questionable payments to foreign officials in the nineteen-seventies, Congress passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits U.S. corporations from making such payoffs overseas. In 2010, Steven Jacobs, who formerly ran Las Vegas Sands’ operations in Asia, filed suit against the company, claiming that his resistance to what he said were Adelson’s illegal demands—that he dig up dirt on Chinese officials to use as leverage—resulted in wrongful termination. More recently, an internal audit committee advised the company of “likely violations of the books and records and internal controls provisions of the FCPA.” (Las Vegas Sands admits possible accounting mistakes, but denies any violations of the F.C.P.A.) It would look bad for a new Republican Administration to shut down S.E.C. and Justice Department probes of a company run by a donor who just spent tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars to elect the President. A settlement is more plausible. In fact, the Obama Department of Justice with which Adelson so strongly disagrees did just that, in a third investigation. Last August, Las Vegas Sands agreed to pay $47.4 million to avoid criminal prosecution by the Department of Justice for money laundering. A Chinese businessman, Zhenli Ye Gon, had transferred forty-five million dollars, suspected by the Mexican government of being tied to drug trafficking, to an account at the Venetian, the same casino where Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, John Kasich, and others appeared last weekend.

Reformers like to complain about the malign influence of money in politics. The real problem is big money in politics, and here a gap has opened between the parties. (I wrote about this issue, and about Adelson’s role in the 2012 campaign, in my book “The Center Holds.”) The average donation to Obama’s 2012 campaign was less than a hundred dollars, while the average donation to Mitt Romney was more than a thousand dollars, according to a Romney staffer. Adelson, the Koch brothers, and a few others took the game to a new level after the Citizens United case, in 2010. Currency trader George Soros contributed twenty-seven million dollars to try to elect John Kerry in 2004. Adelson spent more than three times as much in 2012. Before contributing millions to Super PACs backing Romney, he spent $16.5 million to help Newt Gingrich’s campaign. That kept Gingrich in the race long enough to deprive Romney of two and a half critical months that he needed to unify the G.O.P. The vehicles for that kind of spending were “independent” groups. With the McCutcheon decision, there would still be a limit on the amount that a donor could give directly to a single candidate or party committee, but not on total direct donations in an election cycle.

Early on, an Adelson-backed Super PAC paid for Gingrich ads that were some of the first in the 2012 cycle to blast Romney’s ties to Bain Capital, an issue that the Obama campaign later used to great effect. Gingrich said to reporters, “You have to ask the question, ‘Is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of people and walk off with the money?’ ” The corollary might be: Is democracy really about the ability of one man, representing no one but himself, to have his voice resonate so loudly, and maybe walk off with something beyond two White House latkes?

Photograph by John Gurzinski/The New York Times/Redux.