Here’s the shape of it without the smoke machine: a Fox-famous ex-judge floats a RICO-powered bill to choke off what she casts as George Soros’s covert funding of protests; the internet lights up; Capitol Hill dutifully lines up by jersey color; lawyers reach for the Constitution like firefighters reaching for the hydrant. It’s the kind of story built to run hot on cable and cold in court. Let’s sit with it long enough to separate the signal from the pyrotechnics.

Jeanine Pirro knows TV rhythm. She delivered her announcement with the punch of an opening argument: this isn’t about speech, she said, it’s about foreign-influenced money sluicing through “dark channels” to nudge the public will. Her bill, as sketched on air, would criminalize secret funding of protests and advocacy campaigns intended to shape policy, let prosecutors invoke RICO, and let authorities freeze linked accounts—overnight if needed. The headline writes itself. The footnotes don’t.

RICO is the seductive part. It carries the weight of mob movies and big busts—conspiracy, enterprise, pattern, assets seized before anyone has time to call a banker. But RICO was built to corral criminal enterprises committing predicate crimes: bribery, fraud, extortion, and their noisy cousins. To bolt that framework onto political donations or philanthropy, you need more than bad vibes about a billionaire. You need provable crimes and coordinated criminal purpose. Courts don’t criminalize unpopular opinions with a racketeering label. They look for elements.

And this is where rhetoric outruns law. Soros—polarizing billionaire, funder of liberal causes, permanent apparition in conservative monologues—is a U.S. citizen whose foundations operate within U.S. law when spending here. Plenty of people despise his politics. That’s legal. If someone’s moving money to commit unlawful acts—rioting, violence, laundering—you can already reach for conspiracy statutes, fraud, the Foreign Agents Registration Act if applicable, and a raft of state laws. You don’t need to stretch RICO across the entire tent of advocacy to catch the handful of bad actors hiding near a pole.

The proposed account freezes are the tell. Pretrial financial restraints against political organizations aren’t just aggressive; they veer toward prior restraint territory, which courts swat away on sight. You can starve an organization faster with a bank freeze than with a press conference, which is exactly why judges will insist on precise predicates and due process. “We think this money is influencing politics in ways we don’t like” won’t pass constitutional muster. “Here is the charged criminal conduct, here are the overt acts, here is the enterprise” is the minimum.

Predictably, the politics split down the middle. Republicans praise a crackdown on “dark money” when the spotlight points left. Democrats call it a weaponization of criminal law that chills association. Both are running familiar plays. Both engage in selective outrage. No one volunteering to limit their own allied donors; everyone promising to shield democracy from the other side’s checkbooks. If you’re new to this, welcome to Tuesday.

What would the bill actually do if it moved? It would chill. Not necessarily because it convictingly catches genuine rackets, but because risk-averse donors, nonprofits, and payment processors read the room and back away. Lawyers would start marking up grant agreements like they’re hazardous material. Advocacy groups would spend their spring fundraising on motions and affidavits. You don’t have to win the legal fight to win the month. Process is the punishment.

And yet, there’s a real problem tucked inside the theatrics: opacity in money flows corroding civic trust. Anonymous pass-throughs, pop-up entities, disclosure dodges—the swamp is bipartisan. The honest remedy is boring and hard: tighter, symmetrical disclosure rules; faster reporting windows; fewer Swiss-cheese exceptions; real enforcement with neutral teeth. It’s not TV-segment stuff. It’s committee-hearing grind. But it survives court and cleans actual pipes.

Let’s pause on the “foreign-influenced” flourish. It’s a great sound bite—just vague enough to scandalize and broad enough to dodge a fact check on live TV. If the concern is money controlled by foreign nationals reaching U.S. political activity, we already regulate that. If the concern is Americans funding ideas with global networks attached, that’s called the modern world. The internet flattened borders; the First Amendment didn’t crumble in response.

Legal scholars aren’t exactly mincing words here. To extend RICO into the zone of political funding, prosecutors would have to prove not only transfers and coordination but underlying crimes—plus intent tethered to those crimes, not to disliked outcomes. Judges will ask the simple, fatal questions: What are the predicates? Where’s the enterprise? How do you avoid viewpoint discrimination? And why do your remedies look like prior restraint when the target activity is expressive?

Strip out the theatrics and you’re left with a choice about tools. Use a sledgehammer and you’ll shatter more than the intended target, and the shards will cut whichever side holds power next. Use a scalpel—disclosure, auditing, targeted criminal enforcement when warranted—and you can hit actual misconduct without criminalizing association. If the principle you’re sold only applies to the people you already can’t stand, it’s not a principle. It’s a tactic.

One more inconvenient note: “Soros” functions less as a man than a metonym—a catch-all for progressive infrastructure. That makes him a handy character in narratives that need a villain and a checkbook. But policy written to tackle a symbol tends to age like milk. The courts don’t litigate archetypes. They litigate statutes.

So where does this go? Through the predictable cycle. The bill—maybe notched, maybe rebranded—enters a committee, raises money while raising blood pressure, and hits a constitutional buzzsaw if it gets too close to law. Supporters will claim deterrence is victory. Opponents will claim the First Amendment dodged a bullet. The rest of the country will remember, faintly, that someone promised to fix “dark money” and suspect, correctly, that nothing structural changed.

If lawmakers are serious, there’s a sane path:
– Mandate near-real-time disclosure for large contributions to politically active nonprofits and their affiliates, left and right, no carve-outs.
– Harmonize definitions of “political activity” so regulators can’t be gamed by creative accountants.
– Create expedited judicial review for any pretrial financial restraint touching expressive associations, with a clear predicate-crime threshold.
– Fund the watchdogs to actually do the watching—symmetrically.

None of that will set a chyron on fire. All of it would do more good than a RICO cosplay strut down cable’s main street.

The uncomfortable truth is that money will always look louder when it funds movements you don’t like. Democracy absorbs that noise by protecting the right to advocate and punishing crimes, not causes. We can draw brighter lines around money without dimming the lamp over speech. But that takes the kind of legislative patience TV has trained us to forget.

Until then, expect more bills that sound like justice and read like a dare to the courts. The spectacle will be brisk, the arguments heated, the outcomes familiar. And somewhere inside the dust cloud, the First Amendment—battered, stubborn—will keep insisting on the same old discipline: prove the crime, not the politics.