Clements is the president of American Promise, which advocates for amending the Constitution to allow more federal and state regulation of money in politics. He was previously an assistant Massachusetts attorney general.
A federal grand jury has indicted the Republican speaker of the Ohio House in a $60 million bribery scheme. Meanwhile in Illinois, the Democratic speaker of the House has been implicated in a multimillion-dollar pay-to-play corruption scheme. Different parties, same game.
This latest Midwest swamp fest has all the features of American campaigns today: super PACs funded by a few corporate interests; dark money front groups; politicians strong-arming business people who need legislation; legislators who don't "go along" getting pushed aside; a revolving door between politicians and lobbyists; false attack ads and propaganda; crony capitalism; and utter contempt for the voters and taxpayers who get stuck with the bill.
Here's a short version of the the complaint and last month's federal racketeering indictment of the Ohio speaker, Larry Householder, and his henchmen:
In 2016, electric utility company First Energy had two failing nuclear power plants in Ohio. Company executives considered what they called a "legislative solution" — what the rest of us would call a "bailout."
Meanwhile, Householder wanted to make a comeback from an earlier scandal and reclaim the gavel he'd wielded in Columbus two decades earlier. In January 2017 he visited with First Energy. After a trip on the company's private jet, the deal was done.
Householder, his aides and lobbyists set up Generation Now, a tax-exempt organization (under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code) "to promote energy independence and economic development."
First Energy began making millions of dollars in "contributions" to Generation Now — and it started funding the campaigns of Householder and the legislators who then gave him the votes to be House speaker again.
Householder then introduced a bill to have Ohio ratepayers send an additional $1.3 billion to First Energy, keeping the nuclear plants open. In the face of balking legislators, First Energy ran millions of dollars more through Generation Now for "pressure campaigns" against wavering legislators. It worked: The bailout passed in two months.
Outraged and unhappy voters in Ohio responded by collecting 265,000 signatures to force a ballot referendum to repeal the bailout. At which point Generation Now and other front groups funneled $38 million from First Energy into misleading ads and tactics — defeating the ballot measure and keeping the bailout.
The bottom line: First Energy successfully turned a $60 million investment in campaigns into $1.3 billion in assured revenue at Ohians' expense.
In many ways, it's just another normal tale about the sway cash has over politics in recent decades, since the Supreme Court struck down multiple state and federal campaign finance laws using a new theory of money as speech protected by the First Amendment.
What is most surprising, perhaps, is that any investigation or indictments happened at all. It's true Householder and his allies got sloppy and greedy. They used some of the money for personal gain. They failed to comply with farcical non-coordination rules that magically transform dark money into "independent" free speech. So the indictments may well be rock-solid.
But this humiliation of American democracy in Ohio has all of the everyday features of our broken political system.
When reporters and analysts pressed the utility about the alleged bribery scheme, a "perturbed" CEO Chuck Jones insisted that the company acted "ethically." Complaining about the tone of the questions, Jones said, "It would be really nice if we get to actually talk about the great quarter we had."
In a sense, you can't blame him. Using a multimillion-dollar political spending scheme to secure subsidies, tax breaks and competitive advantage is common practice. It is not corruption or undue influence — it is "free speech." Using a "general welfare" nonprofit to hide the source of the money is not evasion of contribution limits — it is an "independent expenditure." A shake-down from, or a privileged back-door to, the speaker of the House is not corruption — it is "ingratiation" and "access."
Or so says the Supreme Court in decisions such as, most famously, Citizens United v. FEC a decade ago. That's why billions of dollars from corporations, unions, and extremely wealthy people flow into campaigns using the same mechanisms that were used in Ohio.
In the face of this systemic corruption, signs of reform and renewal are growing rapidly. Last year Americans named political corruption the No. 1 crisis facing our nation.
Millions across partisan lines have voted for a constitutional amendment to end unlimited election spending and secure free speech and representation for all. Other nonpartisan reforms such as ranked-choice voting, and end to partisan gerrymandering and full disclosure are gaining ground to put voters first.
This summer, a panel convened by the 200-year-old American Academy of Arts and Sciences completed a two-year study and 50 town halls with Americans around the nation. Its report, "Our Common Purpose," cites the "urgent threat to our democratic way of life" — and provides a detailed agenda for renewing the system by July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The indictments and investigations in Ohio and Illinois may well send a few people to jail. The question is whether the rest of us can muster the national will to fix the crime that is killing our national promise of equal rights, representation and government of we, the people.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.