A new round of campaign finance disclosures by the Republican campaigns for President showed once again how SuperPAC spending has driven the race almost entirely this year. At most, a few dozen extremely rich people are paying for most of the GOP campaigns, and they’re making no apologies for essentially buying the nominating process.

Citizen’s United is not merely a mistake easily corrected, nor is the case simply about campaign finance or money in politics. Citizen’s United is a corporate power case masquerading as a free speech case. In many ways, the decision was less a break from the recent past than a proclamation about the sad reality of corporate power in America.

After Citizens United, which was decided two days after Democrats lost their 60-seat majority in the Senate, there was a push to respond to the Supreme Court ruling with some legislation adding transparency and disclosure to the process. If the Massachusetts race went another way it would have passed; Democrats consistently got 59 votes in the Senate for the DISCLOSE Act. But Republicans wouldn’t budget because they reasoned that the new campaign finance system – actually not a system at all but a recipe for massive spending by corporations and the wealthy – would advantage them. In 2010 they were right.

The early reports were that Sheldon Adelson plowed another $5 million into the SuperPAC supporting Newt Gingrich. It turns out that the money specifically came from Sheldon’s wife Miriam, even though donations can remain anonymous.

Good Lord. Of all the things for Chuck Todd to freak out about, it’s not that unaccountable SuperPACs are outspending the campaigns in South Carolina by more than 2-1. It’s not that corporations have the ability to essentially purchase elections. It’s that a comedian is ripping back the curtain on all of this in a most inappropriate manner.

Today is the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. If you think it’s going well, ask your local Presidential candidate how he likes those SuperPAC ads.

Several actions are taking place today.

Last night, Colbert closed his announcement with the words “Thank you, God bless you, and God bless Citizens United.” Nobody has done more to show how ludicrous our campaign finance system has become. If it leads to a reassessment of the system, his SuperPAC money will have been money well spent.

The assumption for the MA Senate race is that the Big Money Boyz will lard up Scott Brown with oodles of cash, allowing him to run a scorched earth campaign that decimates Elizabeth Warren. But Warren has consistently raised a lot more money than Brown, most of it from small donors, since she entered the race.

One of the biggest disasters with the broken campaign finance system is that we actually have no reporting mechanism for assessing how much money gets spent on campaigns, at least on television. Sometimes candidates and PACs will announce their spending on ads, but local stations are not obligated to report how much they make from political advertising. You see organizations like the Campaign Media Analysis Group quoted in articles about campaign finance, but they basically make educated guesses that involve a lot of legwork. The only way to truly find out how much one television station makes from political advertising is to physically go down to the station and find the person with that information.

So this is interesting. The Montana Supreme Court basically threw down a challenge to the US Supreme Court to revisit the Citizens United decision, by upholding a state law that mandates corporate contribution limits.