In Rolling Stone, Andy Kroll reports that the pledges the nation’s top law firms took—you know, those promises to stop funding Republican lawmakers who allied themselves on Jan. 6 with a seditious attempt to topple government?—have by and large met the same fate as pledges from other powerful companies and interest groups. They didn’t last a year, much less a single election cycle, and a host of big-name law offices have resumed political donations to those lawmakers and to the campaign committees funding them.

That means the 147 Republicans who voted to challenge the election results have already raked in nearly $500,000 in Big Law donations from over two dozen firms, reports Kroll. It turns out that attempting to erase a United States presidential election based on flat-out hoaxes—hoaxes that have now landed several of the pro-Trump “lawyers” in ethical hot water after they presented fraudulent claims to courts—is not, in fact, enough to earn permanent condemnation from the alleged top legal firms in the country. And why should it? If the next election is erased by handpicked boards Republicans have installed to do exactly that, few of the nation’s top lawyers want to find themselves cut off from that coup’s beneficiaries.

What most pervades Kroll’s report, however, is an aura of hopelessness. The watchdogs quoted are relatively blasé about the broken promises, which are unabashedly the result of corruption so encompassing that it is hardly even remarked upon.

“Donating gets them access,” says one expert. “They need that access to serve their clients.”

At this point, in other words, it is widely recognized that members of the House and Senate will only entertain your law-writing requests if you have paid their campaigns money. It does not have to be a lot of money: A few thousand dollars is enough. But all involved, from the law firms to the anti-corruption watchdogs to the reporters to the clients looking for Congress to do them favors, understand that not paying the cash will result in that member of Congress not listening to you.

The logic behind it is simple enough: Listening to one voter in need will gain or lose you one vote. Listening to a campaign-donating lawyer representing a campaign-donating client in a campaign-donating industry might gain you enough cash to send out hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of postcards railing against whoever your next election challenger might be. But whatever the logic might be, the facts on the ground are that “top law firms,” like so many other major corporate givers, understand that if they do not give cash donations even to the backers of sedition, those members of Congress will simply refuse to hear their requests.

Republican leaders have not been shy in suggesting that companies that withhold campaign support as conscience-inspired objections to the party’s new state laws or continued promotion of anti-democratic hoaxes would find themselves facing new Republican laws explicitly punishing them for doing it, either. It’s not that our state and national legislatures are a little corrupt. Leaders are willing to make explicit threats linking a lack of donations to proposed acts of retribution. The nation is filled to the brim with petty warlords who see their domains exclusively as avenues for self-promotion and self-enrichment. The laws that result are whatever laws the most resilient cash-providers want to see; our national laws, rules, and regulations are in many cases an inscrutably complex list of bribes.

It seems we are supposed to have sympathy for the law firms, who are largely held hostage by a system so brazenly corrupt that not paying into it could bend countless laws against their clients. But this is just another case of the prisoner’s dilemma, and an uncomplicated one at that: If every firm and corporation drew a line at, say, supporting an act of treason, then those who supported such acts would be frozen out of office within a handful of election cycles. The corruption of the system can be weaponized against the worst of the crooks, after all. A uniform shift of corporate giving that shut out anti-democratic promoters of hoaxes and violence in favor of whichever challenger managed to muster a smidgen more integrity than that would cut so deeply into fascism’s advertising budget that it might struggle to compete.

Might, that is. It takes only a cursory look at the infrastructure that funds Steve Bannon to prove that fascism is propped up by a few families and companies with deep, deep pockets of their own. It is not just the pillow salesmen of the world attempting to erase the government and replace it with something whiter, more theocratic, and far, far crueler. If you have ever received a cardboard box in the mail marked ULINE, you can be sure that a few pennies of the company’s resulting profit made its way to some of the most explicitly anti-democratic figures in the nation.

So that’s the real predicament, then. The pro-democracy lawyers of America might indeed vow to cut off funds to those whose efforts to undermine an election led to actual violence inside the Capitol, but can they be sure that the sizable chunk of billionaire America that would prefer elections to end—and are willing to tolerate a bit of violence directed at the rest of you, if that is what it takes—wouldn’t simply douse the Hawleys, Boeberts, and others in money in order to save them?

Nobody wants to risk it, for the same reason that no multibillion-dollar company is willing to tolerate replacing a five-cent screw with a six-cent screw in order to head off future lawsuits when the cheaper screw breaks. The next three months of profit are what determine who, on the highest floors of each executive office tower, will get paid what. Whatever problems might arise two years from now can be dealt with by whoever is still around to deal with it, and they can collect their own bonuses for taking bold action to put the problem off another three or six months after that.

There are probably individual firms that have, bizarrely, enough of a commitment to the nation that they’re no longer willing to stomach the dismantling of elections as a tradeoff for getting a seat at the table with those doing the dismantling. But none of them are “top” companies, because “top” companies exist at a scale that filters out individuals with a moral compass; they simply cannot compete. Those that are left are the executives willing to overlook a bit of fascism if it means the government cannot force them to use the six-cent screw.

None of these “top” legal firms are ones who grew to their current size and prestige by turning down clients. If those that tried to topple our government are still in charge of the laws, then toppling the government can be overlooked. The clients are looking for specific laws to be passed or exemptions to be carved out; nobody is paying money to protect American democracy—because there’s no budget for that.