From GW's alcohol-ridden campaign for the House of Burgesses to Bill Clinton's Lincoln Bedroom sleepovers for top donors, money in politics is an American tradition that rivals any other. In 2010, the Supreme Court decided to fan the flames by ruling in Citizens United v. FEC that corporations may spend unlimited amounts of money denouncing or supporting political candidates as long as they did so independently of the main campaign. This led to the political equivalent of an arms race for independent-expenditure political action committees, or super PACs, which can raise unlimited amounts of money for political campaigns without facing scrutiny because they do not give the money directly to the candidate's own campaign.

So what's the big deal?

In 2014, Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern professor Benjamin I. Page took data from thousands of public opinion surveys and compared it to the policies that eventually became law. The results of the study are well summarized in the video below, but they essentially found that public opinion had little to no influence on government policy unless you were wealthy.

This is concerning, especially because big issues like gun control, Wall Street, the environment, and even military action are heavily influenced by big donors. The NRA fights gun control, Wall Street opposes post-2009 regulations, the Koch brothers block environmental regulations, and private defense contractors push self-benefiting weapons programs. With $244 million in contributions, the finance sector stands out as the biggest contributor by far. Presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio are all among its top recipients.

So, if politicians are bought out, how do we get them to implement campaign finance reform?

In short, it's complicated. The more publicized proposals on this issue range from Bernie Sander's litmus test for Supreme Court justices to Lawrence Lessig's short-lived campaign to be the first "referendum president". There is even a "super PAC to end all super PACs". The issue with these top-down approaches is that they rely on major reforms in a federal government that is already filled with political money.

To remedy this, an organization called Represent.Us believes that that the election of more "clean" Congressmen at the local and state level will, eventually, create the congressional majority needed to solve this issue. To do this, they're pushing anti-corruption referendums at the local and state levels in the hopes of working their way up.

Whatever the solution turns out to be, the next congress and the next president will likely need to address it. A recent Bloomberg poll showed that an overwhelming 78 percent of Americans support getting corporate money out of politics. Ironically, if congress's actions reflected public opinion, then a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United would have been passed by now.