Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United ruling in 2010, many Democratic lawmakers and advocacy groups have proposed constitutional amendments to overturn the controversial decision — or attempt to curb its impact. But not everyone who disagrees with the decision thinks that’s the right approach to reducing corporate influence in politics.

Opponents of the decision — which held that unlimited expenditures by corporations to independently advocate for or against federal candidates did not pose a threat of corrupting politicians — gathered at a forum Tuesday in Washington, D.C. 

There, the case was decried as a “product of judicial activism” by Kent Greenfield, a law professor at Boston College Law School. And Jamie Raskin, a Democratic state senator in Maryland who is also a law professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, said the ruling has helped move the nation toward a government “by, of and for the corporations.”

But while both Greenfield and Raskin railed against the threats they see from the influence of corporate money in elections, the men were in opposite corners about whether a constitutional amendment was the best way to fight it.

Greenfield fervently opposes such proposals — which run the gamut from provisions saying simply that “corporations are not people” to measures asserting that Congress and state legislatures have the right to regulate corporate political spending — while Raskin supports them.

“The problem with most of the amendments out there is that they want to burn down the house to get rid of termites,” Greenfield said. “We don’t have to take corporations and say that none of them ever have any constitutional rights in order to solve the problem.”

The federal energy loan program that has created headaches for President Barack Obama has a Mitt Romney connection.

Cathy Tripodi of FaegreBD Consulting lobbies on behalf of Abound Solar, a company that was awarded a $400 million loan guarantee through the same Department of Energy program that aided Solyndra, the now-bankrupt California company that included an Obama bundler as an investor.

Tripodi is a bundler for Romney. She raised $27,000 for the presumptive Republican nominee in April, according to documents filed by his campaign with the Federal Election Commission Sunday.

After receiving a federal loan guarantee, Solyndra ultimately went bankrupt, sticking taxpayers with a $535 million bill and providing fodder for Republican attacks against the president and his green energy initiatives.

Many pundits and politicos began uttering Abound’s name in the same sentence as Solyndra this spring, after Abound announced plans to lay off 280 workers from a Colorado plant and delay the opening of a factory in Indiana. Earlier this month, the Government Reform Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives brought in Abound’s president to testify.

Abound paid $150,000 to FaegreBD Consulting to lobby Congress and the Department of Energy from November through March, records show.

Tripodi is one of 25 lobbyists who have raised more than $3 million for Romney’s campaign.

Tripodi did not respond to requests for comment, and Steve Abely, Abound Solar’s chief financial officer, said her fundraising activities “have nothing to do with consulting she does for Abound and are therefore none of the company’s business.”

Thanks to ethics rules passed in 2007 in the wake of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, all campaigns must regularly reveal the names of lobbyists who fundraise — or “bundle” — money on their behalf.

As President Barack Obama attacks Mitt Romney's tenure at a private equity firm, the former Massachusetts governor continues to benefit from six- and seven-figure contributions made by former peers to a super PAC supporting his candidacy.

Restore Our Future reported $4.6 million in contributions for April, including $1 million from John Kleinheinz, a San Antonio, Texas-based hedge fund manager and $250,000 from Stephen Zide, a former colleague of Romney’s at Bain Capital.

The real total, however, appears to be $3.9 million — the super PAC reported a $750,000 refund of a donation from Texas homebuilder Bob Perry. Perry is still the top donor at $4 million. Overall, though, it was a disappointing haul for the group — when factoring the refund, the amount was less than half what it raised the previous month.

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee outraised Romney and the Republican National Committee by a nearly 2-1 margin in April, which appears counter to media reports last week that indicated the two camps were running about even.

Last week, the Obama campaign started an advertising blitz attacking Romney’s tenure at Bain, claiming that the company was responsible for buying a steel company, saddling it with debt and then shutting it down, leaving hundreds of employees out of work. Romney says he left Bain two years prior to the closure of the company.

John Kleinheinz is founder of Capital Partners Inc., which manages a fund with nearly $2 billion in assets. Stephen Zide has been a managing director at Bain Capital since 2001 and an employee since 1997, according to the company’s website. He gave the super PAC $250,000 in March of last year bringing his total contribution to Restore Our Future to $500,000.

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s Republican U.S. Senate primary in Nebraska, campaign finance watchdogs are concerned about the role businessman Joe Ricketts played in helping underdog state Sen. Deb Fischer secure the GOP nomination.

Ricketts, the founder of the Omaha-based online brokerage firm TD Ameritrade, was behind a $250,000 last-minute super PAC ad buy designed to boost Fischer’s prospects in a three-way race that also featured frontrunner Jon Bruning, the state’s attorney general, and state Treasurer Don Stenberg, the favored candidate of the conservative Club for Growth and tea party-aligned Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.).

Thanks to this spending surge and an eleventh-hour endorsement from former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, Fischer garnered more than twice as many votes as Stenberg — and beat Bruning by 5 percentage points. Her upset came after she raised only about one-eighth of Bruning’s $3.6 million haul.

If she prevails in November against Democrat Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska governor and U.S. senator, watchdogs worry Ricketts’ influence would be considerable. 

“I don't think there is any doubt Ricketts will get more access to Fischer than regular Nebraskans,” said Adam Smith, communications director at Public Campaign. “This is about electing politicians that will benefit his bottom line and the TD Ameritrade lobbyists will know they have a likely champion if she's elected in November.”

This concern is echoed by Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, which, like Public Campaign, favors campaign finance regulations.

“Washington is responsive to the people who got them in power,” said McGehee. “You know the old saying, ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune’? That’s the system we have.”

The American Legislative Exchange Council, which backs free-market legislation in the states, has been controversial in part because its membership includes major corporations as well as state legislators. Largely unnoticed has been the influence wielded by a third group of ALEC members: state-based think tanks. Two of those think tanks took center stage at last weekend’s ALEC Task Force Summit in Charlotte.

The Arizona-based Goldwater Institute and the Michigan-based Mackinac Center between them successfully shepherded five model bills through ALEC’s Commerce, Insurance, and Economic Development Task force — all targeting public sector unions.

Goldwater representative Byron Schlomach introduced two bills, one requiring that public employees approve their state employer’s automatic deduction of union dues from paychecks every year. Another would prohibit union officials from taking paid leave from public sector jobs to perform union duties.

Michigan’s Mackinac Center sent labor policy analyst Paul Kersey to introduce three more bills targeting unions. One of those model bills is already Michigan law, requiring public sector unions to make audits of their financial activities public. Another Mackinac proposal would require public sector union members to vote on their union membership every three to five years, and a third would make it easier for public and private employees to decertify their union.

For the second time in two weeks, super PACs will play a major role in determining the outcome of a U.S. Senate primary contest.

Republican Jon Bruning, Nebraska’s attorney general, was expected to win in a cakewalk for the seat, soon to be vacated by retiring Sen. Ben Nelson, a Democrat. Instead, two underfunded insurgent candidates — Don Stenberg and Deb Fischer — are giving him a run for his money, thanks in large part to a handful of outside groups.

Bruning has the fundraising advantage, having raised more than $3.6 million for his campaign. Stenberg has raised about $750,000, while Fischer has raised less than $440,000 for the race, including $35,000 of her own money.

But heading into today’s primary, conservative outside groups have spent more than $2 million on advertising, according to Federal Election Commission records, with nearly $1 million going toward ads attacking Bruning. The ads appear to have been effective — Bruning’s numbers have slipped, according to recent polls.

“This is an unusual amount of spending for a Nebraska primary,” said Michael Wagner, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “I don’t think the Bruning campaign foresaw this.”

Last week, outside groups led by the conservative Club for Growth spent millions in the GOP U.S. Senate primary election in Indiana, where six-term incumbent Sen. Richard Lugar lost to Richard Mourdock, a tea party favorite.

The Club is again flexing its muscles in Nebraska, where it supports Stenberg. So far, its super PAC, called Club for Growth Action, has reported spending more than $714,000 opposing Bruning, mostly on radio and TV ads.

Three Republican groups have formed a super PAC called “Crossroads Generation” and given it $750,000 in seed money in an attempt to attract the youth vote, a population that has traditionally eluded the GOP.

Announced Monday, the group was created by the American Crossroads super PAC, the College Republican National Committee and the Young Republican National Federation. Each of the three groups gave $250,000.

The organization says it wants to bring in young voters disillusioned by high unemployment and the national debt.

“Crossroads Generation aims to give a voice to a generation of Americans who are much worse off than they were four years ago,” said Derek Flowers, formerly of the Republican National Committee, who serves as the group’s executive director.

The Republican Party has not done well lately attracting young voters.

In 2008, young Americans favored Barack Obama by a two-to-one margin. Youth voters tend to favor Democratic presidential candidates over Republican candidates, though the gap was unusually large in 2008. Since 1992, the majority of voters ages 18 to 29 have voted Democrat in presidential elections, according to Surbhi Godsay, a researcher at the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), a research center based at Tufts University. 

American Crossroads has raised $28 million for the 2012 election for spending on Republican candidates. The group was created by Republican operatives Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie. Super PACs can raise unlimited funds from wealthy individuals, corporations and labor unions to spend on advertising.

The other two founding groups report a membership of 350,000.

Super PACs and other outside groups are on track to spend more on tea party favorite Richard Mourdock in his battle to unseat Sen. Richard Lugar in Indiana’s Tuesday Republican primary than Mourdock’s own campaign, records show.

Lugar, a moderate known for his expertise in foreign affairs and national security, is in danger of seeing his 36-year run as a senator come to an end. Mourdock, the Indiana state treasurer, was leading Lugar by 10 points in a Howey/DePauw Indiana Battleground Poll released Friday.

Through the most recent campaign finance filings with the Federal Election Commission, outside groups supportive of Mourdock have spent about $3 million, $1 million more than Mourdock’s own campaign.

A total of $4.5 million has been spent on the race on independent expenditures so far, the most on a congressional race this season and a possible preview of elections to come.

“It's difficult to believe that Mourdock would have seriously threatened a six-term senator had he not had strong backing from the super PACS and other outside groups,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

Sabato added that outside groups such as super PACs can be more influential in a U.S. Senate or U.S. House race than they can be at the presidential level.

“Voters get tons of free news coverage about the presidential candidates,” he said. “But often their only frequent sources of information about congressional candidates come from TV ads.”

Super PACs and certain nonprofits are permitted to accept unlimited contributions from corporations, unions and wealthy individuals and spend the money on advertising to help elect or defeat a candidate. They were made possible thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and a lower court ruling in 2010.

Two $25,000 donations during the final days of a hotly contested Illinois primary are raising more questions about whether super PACs — the political committees that have seen a flood of money from millionaires and billionaires — are being used to circumvent campaign contribution limits.

Back in March, sophomore Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) wanted to help his friend and fellow Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger survive a rare incumbent-on-incumbent primary by sending some money his way.

Many members of Congress have “leadership PACs” set up for just this purpose — they direct funds from the PACs to their fellow representatives in hopes of earning support for senior leadership positions.

Thanks to redistricting, Kinzinger, rather than face an easy primary, found himself facing 10-term Rep. Don Manzullo.

Schock’s leadership PAC gave Kinzinger’s campaign $5,000 for the primary fight — the maximum allowed contribution. But Schock also managed to direct 10 times that much toward efforts aiding his buddy with help from the super PAC, earning the ire of campaign finance watchdogs.

The super PAC, Campaign for Primary Accountability, like other organizations made possible by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, can accept unlimited funds and use the money to attack candidates in elections.

The nonpartisan, Texas-based organization — which has made a name for itself going after incumbents in both parties — had been running negative ads about Manzullo. According to a story in Roll Call, Schock asked the group if he could designate a donation to be used to help Kinzinger.

They were happy to accommodate.