In 1976, the Supreme Court erroneously found that since money enabled political speech, it was itself speech, and so campaign contributions and expenditures were protected by the First Amendment. That finding did not invalidate all regulations pertaining to campaign spending; the Court examined the policy rationales for a variety of different spending regulations and found some of them to be sufficiently compelling to justify the regulations. If money is speech, however, limiting spending by wealthy individuals and entities for the purpose of maintaining a level playing field is inevitably constitutionally suspect. As a result, we live in a world in which people like Michael Bloomberg and Howard Schultz can plausibly consider running for president, and far worse could follow in the future.
As I’ve noted before, the level of ideological polarization in our country means that money is overrated as a factor in national elections, so this isn’t as big a crisis as you might otherwise think. The success of various left-wing candidates, most notably Bernie Sanders, in raising large sums of money in small chunks on the internet also indicates that the system, while ramshackle, is still fundamentally fair.
There is no real prospect of the Court changing its mind on this issue, or of a constitutional amendment reversing the campaign expenditure decisions, so the world we will have in the foreseeable future is the one we have today. The only real question is whether the Court will revisit its conclusion that disclosure regulations are valid. The Court’s position on that point has been stated unambiguously in multiple decisions, including Citizens United, so you would think it would never come up again, but the right never gives up, and stranger things have happened. If you don’t believe me, just look at the series of Obamacare decisions, and Justice Thomas’ recent complaints about New York Times v. Sullivan.