An argument, made in public, on the record.

“Super PAC” is shorthand, not a legal term. The formal name is an independent-expenditure-only political committee, and it exists because of a pair of 2010 federal court decisions — Citizens United v. FEC in the Supreme Court and SpeechNow.org v. FEC in the D.C. Circuit — which together held that independent political spending is protected speech and that contributions to committees making only independent expenditures may not be capped.

The practical consequence is simple. A committee like ours may raise unlimited sums from individuals, corporations, and unions, and may spend those sums advocating for or against federal candidates. In exchange, it accepts two binding restrictions.

The two restrictions

• We cannot give money to a candidate. Not to a campaign, not to a candidate’s own committee, not directly and not indirectly.
• We cannot coordinate. Our spending has to be genuinely independent of any candidate, campaign, or party committee. No shared strategy, no shared vendors acting as a conduit, no advance notice of what we are about to run.

Coordination is not a technicality we work around. An expenditure made in coordination with a campaign stops being an independent expenditure and becomes an in-kind contribution — which, at the sums a committee like this one handles, would be flatly illegal. We treat the firewall as the price of doing this work.

What we disclose

Everything the law requires, on the schedule the law sets. Our registration with the Federal Election Commission lists who we are, who our treasurer is, and where our funds are held. We report our contributors, and our regular filings show what we raise, what we spend, and what we owe, including the everyday costs of running the organization. When we spend for or against a candidate, we file independent-expenditure reports showing what we spent, when, on which candidate, and whether it was for or against. Every public communication we pay for carries our name and states that it is not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Those filings are public. Anyone can read them, and we would rather they did.