Citizens Un-tied: An Introduction

so much depends upon 

presidential elections

fraught with consequence

beside the white chickens

I could lie to myself, rationalize away the gravity of the quadrennial event, pretend like nothing much will change, stress the importance of state and municipal boundaries, count the blessings of living in my Massachusetts bubble, or employ whatever other strategies come up to bury my head in the sand. But every four years, America votes for a new president, and it makes me dissolve. It feels like I receive a consequential weather report only every few years, and the forecast can only be a perpetual Category 4 Hurricane or a mere constant drizzle.

But a strange thing happened on November 6, 2024. The worst case scenario happened, and I wasn’t panicked. It was sad, to be sure. Sad people surrounded me, worrying what would become of the nation, mourning what the nation already became, questioning if the nation had ever been any better. But I was… resolute? Assured? Sober? A journalist I admire sent a newsletter that morning, and it looks like she has since deleted these words, but they meant so much to me that I jotted them down:

“In some ways, we are no longer fighting for our own rights, but for those who come next... Which is sad, but hopeful in some ways.”

It’s a hard sentiment to swallow. But in those wee hours of the national hangover, they gave me direction. They helped me not fall apart. Which makes my subsequent malaise even more embarrassing.

I know I’m not alone in feeling like fighting is, well, sisyphean - the #RESISTANCE of 2017 is harder to feel now, under this punishing second term of 2025. Seth Meyers was asked last year how his approach to topical comedy changed now during the president’s new administration, compared to the first one:

“Tonally, we realized we could not come out of the gates, post this election, the same way we came out of the last one. Which [the way we acted last time] I think was sort of resolve, “this isn’t who we are”. Because [the result of the 2016 election] did sort of feel like maybe a rounding error… I didn’t feel that way in 2024. I wasn’t like ‘Again?!” … [the result of the 2024 election] is who we are. That doesn’t mean it’s always who we’re gonna be, but we couldn’t come out of the gates the same way.”

In other words, he questioned the efficacy of fighting too hard, given that our descent into fascism now looks less like a historical aberration and more like the inevitable direction we’re heading. If we let that pessimism guide our outlook, activism starts seeming more and more pointless.

The good news is that activism is actually making wonderful strides in the court of public opinion. Despite how laws and the media want us to think otherwise, the general American public is growing more progressive by the day on many major issues. Through tireless campaigning, we have shifted the needle of public opinion on so many issues in the recent past. It sometimes seems like support for same-sex marriage has always been the democratic party line, but it wasn’t until Barack Obama’s second term that a sitting president endorsed marriage equality.

Still my pessimism remains because of one key question: if the American public is getting more and more progressive, why are our laws at-best stagnant or in most cases going backwards? Why can't things get better?

I have a theory.

Throw a dart into the majority chambers of the House of Representatives and you’ll hit someone who hates trans people. Being transphobic is obviously very chic these days, after all. But no Republican congressperson has fought harder in these past few years to brand themselves as Leader of the TERFs than Nancy Mace. Ever since the 2024 election cycle, she’s touted the erosion of trans rights as one of her key priorities - banning trans women from federal bathrooms, using slurs online and in session, calling for us to be institutionalized, among other hateful acts. 

Surprisingly, not even three years ago, on May 21, 2023, she had this to say:

“I’m pro-transgender rights. I’m pro-LGBTQ… As an adult, if you want to make that permanent change, that is your decision… it’s your choice, your body.”

Let’s not give her too much credit - that interview lets her parrot damaging talking points and dog whistles about “irreversible surgery and hormone blockers on minors”. Her career before 2024 was filled with the weird combination of vocal support for the LGBTQ+ community on one hand, and tricky legislation against us on the other.

But for the first few years of her career in Washington, she at least presented herself as a queer ally. Why did this change?

It'd be foolish to point at only a single reason - Trump’s win probably emboldened harsher positions. Her district got redrawn and probably added pressure to swing conservative. But an underreported aspect of her turn to evil was, of course, a Super PAC.

Mace had a tight race in 2022. She only won 56% of the vote in her district. One of the biggest expenditures in this house race was $108,086 in a transphobic attack ad against Mace, run by the “American Principles Project” Super PAC, claiming she was too soft on trans people. One election later, Republican money was back in line, and Mace’s heel-turn began in earnest.

To put it bluntly - a very small group of people with a large amount of money had a direct, tangible, dangerous impact on the priorities of one Congresswoman. And now I can't pee in the Smithsonian anymore.

Campaign Finance has become an obsession of mine in the past 18 months. It’s oft mentioned and seldom explained - we hear some candidates occasionally use “Overturn Citizens United” as a rallying cry, but this is usually followed up by misunderstanding catchphrases like “corporations aren’t people”. In the sixteen years since that fateful Supreme Court decision, so much has changed. Some things prognosticators were very worried about didn’t end up being that impactful, but other things we couldn’t foresee have metastasized, leaving American democracy far, far weaker.

Nancy Mace’s turn on queer rights in the early 2020s is just one of thousands and thousands of examples of the power of dark money on our legislators. In my humble opinion, there are few forces doing more harm to the American Electorate than our broken Campaign Finance system. And until something is done about it, all our activism will continue to fall on Congress’ ears, deaf to their citizens, listening only to monied interests.

I’ll be writing more about this in the weeks and months to come. It’s a complicated issue with a lot of moving parts, and it merits time taken to explain. I plan to talk about the history of US Campaign Financing, legal battles in the 21st Century, “Corporations are People”, PACs as tools of corruption and greed, the uneven power between people and dark money, and the terrible, tangible impact of Citizen United on every election in the last 16 years. I hope to hear from all of you on your observations, questions, concerns and ideas. And after we’ve gone through all that, I think we can start thinking about where we go from here. Recent years have inspired innovative attempts to level the financial playing field, and I think if we all get our heads together, we can come up with even more strategies. One way or another, we have to fight back. If not for us, for those who come next.