Joe Biden's struggle to get FCC nominee Gigi Sohn confirmed by the Senate offers an early warning sign of the legislative battles ahead. Overcoming Republican opposition may be a moot point if the president can't hold his party's narrow Senate majority together against an onrushing tide of dark money.
Dark money spending — untraceable political donations funneled through super PACs that aren't required to report who their donors are — topped $1 billion in the 2020 election cycle. Perhaps surprisingly, that funding largely benefited Democrats, and that sum exploded to the unprecedented $8.9 billion midterm spending spree of 2022. Republican and conservative media organs have already begun using Democrats' extraordinary reliance on dark money as a PR cudgel.
