As the American colonists multiplied and elaborated their impassioned descriptions of 18th century British political corruption, they turned time and again to a quote from Jugurtha, a 2nd century B.C.E. king of Numidia. “All of Rome is for sale,” Jugurtha was supposed to have said, “if only it could find a purchaser.”

Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court opened the floodgates of campaign spending with its 2010 Citizens United decision, the limits of what is for sale in the public arena have steadily expanded. Recently, we’ve been hearing about a bizarre new twist on this theme. As the Republicans approach their first presidential candidate debate on August 23, some of the marginal candidates have been experimenting with novel ways of reaching the threshold number of distinct donor contributions required to qualify for a spot on the debate stage. Doug Burgum, the North Dakota billionaire governor, is offering a $20 gift card for a $1 contribution to his campaign. Another candidate is running a lottery for tuition assistance, and a third is offering a 10% kickback to any donor who brings in more donors.

My point is not to stir outrage about these donation-purchasing schemes but to provide one more illustration of how drastically (and sometimes bizarrely) the Supreme Court’s rewriting of campaign finance law has altered political behavior. And in all too many cases, the correct verb here is not “altered” but “corrupted.”

It is worth noting that, throughout the sad history of the Court’s judicial activism in this field, the concept of corruption has often been used as one criterion to determine whether or not some particular statute can pass constitutional muster. The narrower the Court’s definition of what constitutes corruption, the broader the range of financial transactions left free of what the Court will permit by way of regulation. Finally, in the 2014 decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the five member majority concluded, in effect, that the only transactions against which the public can any longer defend itself are “quid pro quo” activities – essentially bribes.

This narrowing of the definition of corruption is both dangerous and misleading. Yes, of course, bribery is a blatant form of corruption, but that word also meaningfully embraces what the Oxford English Dictionary calls “A change for the worse of an institution, custom, etc.; a departure from a state of original purity.” That definition pretty much sums up what the Court itself has done to our democratic elections by its activist rewriting of campaign finance law.

Once the Supreme Court substituted its legislation for the laws duly enacted by the people’s representatives in Congress and in dozens of state legislatures, corruption in its root sense has become pervasive. Barely to the leeward of outright bribery, the deployment of vast sums of campaign contributions for the obvious purpose of buying influence with elected decisionmakers is a major component of this corrupting effect on our politics. A more subtle but no less insidious form of corruption is a noticeable softening of many citizens’ critical facilities in the electoral arena.

Some of my Missoula neighbors have recently provided an illustration of this, during our current mayoral campaign. As I outlined in a recent post on this platform, the National Association of Realtors made an unprecedented contribution to a superPAC supporting one of the candidates, outweighing the combined contributions to the campaigns of all five of the mayoral candidates.

There is only one plausible explanation for that gigantic investment, and it isn’t that the NAR loves Missoula or that it wants to bolster our economy with a little extra cash. This is a straightforward effort to buy influence by putting the organization’s chosen candidate in the mayor’s office. The claim that the superPAC is “independent” of that candidate’s own campaign is precisely the kind of Orwellian doublethink by which the Supreme Court’s rulings have corrupted our political culture.

It seems that we may now have lived in the Through the Looking Glass world of Citizens United long enough to have become a little disoriented. We must not lose our way, though, and I’m confident that good old-fashioned American common sense will prevail. Here in Missoula, I’ve heard of people fashioning “Not for Sale” signs to indicate our community’s determination to remain in charge of itself. Jugurtha may have thought that Rome would sell itself if it could only find a buyer, but I don’t think that Missoula or America is ready yet to hang up a “For Sale” sign.

Please feel free to share this post with friends and colleagues.

Daniel Kemmis is a former mayor of Missoula and the author of Citizens Uniting to Restore Our Democracy.