• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, August 3, 2026

Lawyer, activist, and friend of mine Larry Lessig was on stage at the P&T Knitwear Bookstore a few weeks ago. Talking about the corrosive nature of money in politics, he used a metaphor about the Titanic. 

"The captain of the Titanic, he hits the iceberg, looks out on the deck, and there's a whole bunch of ice on the deck. He thinks, OK, we can fix this. We can clean the deck, and then the engineer tells him that there's a gash in the hull, and six of the 16 watertight compartments are filling with water, and so they know it doesn't matter if they clear the deck. The ship is going down. 

“Then they gotta convince people to get into lifeboats. Which, in the middle of the Atlantic, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the winter, on the fricking Titanic, it's really hard, 'cause people are like, we're on the Titanic. Like, why do we have to get in a lifeboat?”

The “gash” is the metaphor, and it rings true.

Then Lessig did something I did not expect, which was put his own life's work on the deck. "All the work I've been doing for 20 years, and the work that the anti-gerrymandering people are doing -- that, in my view, is the equivalent of the ice on the deck,” he said. “We know how to fix it.

“But I actually think there's a gash in the hull, and the gash in the hull is the world of engagement-based media, which profits from turning us into ignorant people who hate each other.”

I have spent years in the rooms where people work on that gash, with content moderation policy, transparency reports, another hearing where a CEO apologizes and commits to things nobody enforces.

It is a strange feeling to have one of the country's best-known campaign finance reformers (which Lessig is) explaining, in considerable detail, exactly how he plans to clear the deck and repair the gash.

His plan started in a parking lot in Maine on election day 2023, where Lessig was gathering signatures for a ballot initiative capping contributions to super PACs at $5,000.

"The first guy to come up to me said, what are you here for? And I said, I'm gathering signatures for this initiative." So Lessig asked him what he was there for, and the guy said he was collecting signatures to put Donald Trump on the 2024 Maine Republican primary ballot. “I said, Ok, here's the initiative. So he read the initiative, and he said, hell, yeah. And he signed it. He said, ‘I'm gonna get everybody signing my petition to come over and sign your initiative, 'cause it's not a partisan issue in Maine or anywhere in the country. Everybody gets it.’"

Lessig’s super PAC-capping initiative passed in November 2024 with 75% of the vote. "More people voted for this initiative in Maine that have ever voted for anything in the history of Maine," Lessig said.

And then two super PACs sued to kill it within weeks.

What happened next is why this is worth writing about. Neal Katyal argued for Maine and persuaded the district court to acknowledge something no federal court had ever said so plainly: unlimited contributions to super PACs can create corruption. Judge Karen Frink Wolf agreed, writing that these contributions "can serve as the quid in a quid pro quo arrangement."

Then she struck the law down anyway, concluding that Supreme Court precedent left no constitutional way to regulate it.

Lessig wasn't discouraged. A judge who accepts your central factual argument before ruling against you has, in effect, written the question for appeal.

That appeal was argued in Boston on Wednesday morning, with Katyal again -- and again almost nobody in the media covered it.

Judge Seth Aframe boiled it down to whether a candidate's backers can do it by going to one guy or whether they have to go to a thousand guys. Katyal gave the panel the number, from $86 million at the time these things were invented, to $6.9 billion last cycle, and asked, "If not now, when?" Lessig's forecast, weeks before the hearing: "I'm certain the First Circuit's gonna say this is wrong." 

The First Circuit has never ruled on this question, which is the entire reason Maine was chosen after the D.C. Circuit, Alaska and Massachusetts all closed the door. Every other circuit that has taken it up has gone the other way, so a win in Boston splits the circuits, and a split is the ticket to Washington.

Which is where most people stop listening, because everyone knows this Supreme Court is never going to move on money in politics.

Lessig’s answer begins with a piece of history almost nobody has right, which is that Citizens United did not create super PACs. A different court, the D.C. Circuit, held in SpeechNow.org v. FEC that what you give to a PAC cannot be capped either, so long as the PAC stays independent. That is the ruling that built the super PAC, and it is not the famous one. 

So nobody has to reverse anything, which is the setup for the part that got me. "I'm not saying we win on the law alone,” says Lessig. “We do win on the law. But you think about the politics." Super PACs are not a partisan asset, both sides run them, so there is no tribal reason for any justice to protect them. "Because I feel like we're giving them a gift. And so, therefore, we declare super PACs are over, and the whole country will be huzzah for the Supreme Court. It's the most popular thing they could possibly do. But the point is, they completely save face. They don't have to admit error anywhere."

That is not a legal strategy, it is a media strategy, and I recognize it when I hear it. He is not asking nine people to change their minds. He is handing them a way to look good doing something they might already be willing to do.

The hard part is the one Larry named himself, which is convincing anyone to get in. Fifteen years of losing this argument in public, and when you ask him how it ends at the Supreme Court, he does not hedge or lawyer it. He says seven votes.

I keep thinking about the guy with the Trump petition. A bipartisan solution may be on the horizon.