AP Photo/Danny Johnston Members of Arkansas Democracy Coalition and other groups rally at the Arkansas state Capitol in Little Rock, Arkansas, Tuesday, May 19, 2015. Speakers at the rally called for a constitutional amendment to overturn the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling. rules-logo-109_2.jpg B ooks about who pays for American elections rarely hit the bestseller lists, but a rash of new titles tackling the once-obscure topic of campaign financing signals that publishers now regard political money as popular fare. Whether your cup of tea is juicy details about the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, like those New Yorker writer Jane Mayer dishes up in her 450-page narrative Dark Money , or rigorous legal analysis along the lines of what Richard L. Hasen delivers in Plutocrats United, the newly hot genre of political money has something to offer. For progressive organizers, California writer and activist Derek Cressman’s When Money Talks: The High Price...

(Photo: AP/CQ Roll Call/Bill Clark) A protester holds a sign at a rally in front of the Supreme Court in 2012 to mark the second anniversary of the Citizens United decision. P rogressive activists tend to cast the Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, handed down six years ago today, as a historically destructive decision ushering in an era of corruption and even oligarchy. In a statement typical of many condemning Citizens United on its sixth anniversary, Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer called it “one of the worst and most damaging decisions in the Court’s history.” But for advocates of campaign-finance restrictions, the high court’s 2010 decision to reverse longtime curbs on independent corporate and union spending may turn out to be something of a political gift. The ruling has given voters fed up with the political system a concrete focus for their anger, and helped push the issue of money in politics from the margins to the...