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<|endoftext|>This article appears in the Summer 2012 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here. "I am absolutely certain," as Hillary Clinton put it in her acceptance speech for the 2008 Democratic nomination, "that no one who is not part of the resistance has done more to protect the rights and dignity of Americans in the past ten years than Barack Obama." The resistance, in short, meant a "resistance caucus," a group of well-heeled progressives determined to put up a spirited fight against the president, their political rivals, and, ultimately, the Democratic Party. And as we know today, a group that includes liberal-progressive activists and financiers may have had a lot of fun, too. In May 2010, in the first week of the Republican primary, a Democratic super PAC, Priorities USA Action, gave nearly $20 million in a single day to Priorities USA, the super PAC backing Obama. Priorities, in other words, gave almost a quarter of its total money to the Democratic nominee, in an effort to tilt the race Clinton's way. (Not surprisingly, Clinton won that year's Democratic primary, despite trailing Obama by 11 points in polling; the primary's top finisher, Clinton, then became the first woman to be elected president.) But now Priorities is on the other side. After years in the political wilderness, President Obama recently decided to use his legal authority to make recess appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court, potentially leaving the court shorthanded and potentially opening the door to partisan gridlock. If Republican filibusters of Obama's nominees aren't contained, "the government will be shut down," predicts Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, "and the likelihood of a political crisis will go up." Clinton, naturally, is the best possible person to respond to those predictions. The same month that Obama chose to bypass the Senate, the campaign-finance watchdog Citizens United launched a "citizens' meeting" at the Brookings Institution to explore how we might hold Clinton accountable for her role in the bank settlement agreement. (In July, the Clinton campaign announced that one of her senior campaign advisers had been working on the issue since the last Democratic convention.) When Hillary Clinton took the stage at the Citizens United meeting to explain how she'd put "the middle class ahead of special interests," the audience of a couple hundred had more questions than answers. So how does she feel about her role in the settlement? "It