Democrats were quick to criticize Republicans who flirted with banks and big oil. Why won’t they admit that Hillary’s links are a problem too?

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Clinton has also criticized the supreme court’s ruling in Citizens United by rightly pointing out that the original case was sparked by an attempt to air a documentary that was critical of her right before an election. Yet she has reaped the rewards from the ruling – possibly more than any other candidate – from myriad Super Pacs and outside groups that have spent heavily in favor of her candidacy.

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The president of Citizens United even told the Center for Public Integrity last week: “Wouldn’t you know that Hillary Clinton has become one of the greatest beneficiaries of the Citizens United supreme court decision. It is an irony that is not lost on me.”

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...it would be difficult not to worry about at least the potential for a conflict of interest, when weapons manufacturers and Saudi Arabia were making donations to the Clinton Foundation while their weapons deals were approved by the State Department, oil companies were doing the same before the State Department approved the oil sands pipeline project, and other fossil fuels donated at around the same time the secretary was advocating increased fracking abroad.

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And by taking this position that only quid pro quo equals corruption, Clinton supporters are essentially adopting the reasoning of the Roberts court that they claim to abhor – that unless there is direct evidence of overtly trading money for votes, corruption doesn’t exist. As Lawrence Lessig has written, Democrats have been slowly embracing this stance for years, but the Clinton campaign seems to cementing it as the party’s policy.

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No one has made this point better than Clinton surrogate and former representative Barney Frank – or should I say, the 2012 version of him. Last week, Frank accused Sanders supporters of engaging in McCarthyism by suggesting that politicians, and Clinton in particular, are influenced by big money contributions from wealthy backers, and as a result, did not push for prosecutions of the executives of large banks. However, Frank sang an altogether different tune about the influence of campaign contributions when he was leaving Congress in 2012.

“People say, ‘Oh, it doesn’t have any effect on me,’” Frank told NPR at the time about the constant need to continually raise money as a congressman. “Well if that were the case, we’d be the only human beings in the history of the world who on a regular basis took significant amounts of money from perfect strangers and made sure that it had no effect on our behavior.”

I guess we can assume Clinton is the first person in the history of the world to avoid this problem altogether then.