Here is how Marjorie Taylor Greene's lawyer had a profound impact on American politics
James Bopp, Jr., the lawyer representing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in today's hearing about whether she should be disqualified from running for reelection because of her actions regarding the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection, may not be a household name to most but he previously has had a profound impact on American politics.
That's because Bopp was the lead attorney who argued before a federal three-judge panel in 2008 that the conservative non-profit Citizens United should be able to air "Hillary: The Movie" on television during the Democratic primary.
Two years after the lower court rejected that petition, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the ruling and adopted many of Bopp's arguments, reversing 100 years of campaign-finance precedents and paved the way for virtually unlimited corporate campaign contributions.
As reported by Mother Jones, Bopp has made a career of trying to dismantle laws that limit high-dollar political contributions.
"Even before Citizens United," Mother Jones writes, "he’d won a Supreme Court ruling striking down big chunks of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law. He was instrumental in Bush v. Gore, and he successfully beat back a massive lawsuit from the FEC alleging that the Christian Coalition had illegally campaigned on behalf of candidates including Oliver North, Jesse Helms, and Newt Gingrich. And now he’s pursuing dozens of other cases that, if successful, could eliminate caps on political contributions, allow campaigns to hide their donors from public view, and kill public-financing laws across the nation."