Dollars for Life : the anti-abortion movement and the fall of the republican establishment

Summary: "The chaos following the 2020 election revealed how much the Republican Party would sacrifice for Donald Trump-so much, it seemed, that the party was willing to anger crucial corporate donors. But then again, Trump's rise never seemed to have much to do with campaign spending: he won the 2016 race notwithstanding being vastly outspent. In this deeply researched and surprising history, Mary Ziegler shows that the GOP's populist turn has everything to do with campaign finance, although not in the ways we might expect. Dollars for Life tells the story of Jim Bopp, an enigmatic Indiana attorney, and his antiabortion colleagues who came to see campaign finance as the linchpin in the fight to reverse Roe v. Wade. A series of setbacks in the abortion wars convinced these activists that unless they had the freedom to spend as much as they wished (and the know-how to help GOP leaders do the same), Republican presidents looking to fill judicial vacancies would gravitate to compromisers and ciphers. Right-to-lifers joined and ultimately transformed fights over campaign finance, unleashing a torrent of interest-group spending-and eliminating one of the party establishment's most powerful tools to sideline populists. The fight for dollars for life had profound consequences for the law of the First Amendment and beyond. What began as a quest to influence the Republican establishment became a fight to gut and then replace it. And what started as a single-minded obsession with the Supreme Court fundamentally changed how American democracy works"--