Another day, and still no Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Campaign-finance watchers are getting antsy.

Election money groups have had their post-ruling conferences planned for weeks, but these sessions have been repeatedly pushed back as the Court continues to hold off on issuing the major campaign-finance decision.

When the ruling finally comes, the Center for Competitive Politics and the James Madison Center for Free Speech will team up to present a joint conference call. Both groups advocate for less restrictive campaign finance laws. On the other side, rules advocates at the Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause, Democracy 21, and Public Campaign will host a teleconference. So will the Brennan Center for Justice, which favors campaign finance reform.

And Public Citizen, US PIRG and Voter Action will join forces when the ruling comes for a post-ruling conference that doubles as a strategy announcement: The groups will unveil a plan to counter the ramifications of the decision.

The ruling is widely expected to vindicate the Citizens United, a conservative advocacy organization. It's the breadth of the decision and how far it will go in scaling back campaign finance law that remains in question.

If it seems like years since this whole thing started, that's because it has been. The case started last term, but the Court chose to broaden the scope of the case and rehear oral arguments, pushing its decision into a new season.

If you've been sitting this one out, some background after the jump.

The Supreme Court originally set out last year to consider a campaign finance question that hardly seemed so major. The justices were to examine whether the FEC could use rules governing "electioneering communications" to limit how Citizens United could broadcast a movie that looked scathingly upon then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The group planned to broadcast ads and on-demand showings of Hillary: The Movie during the election season.

Such a broadcast strategy would trigger restrictions on electioneering communication set up by the McCain-Feingold legislation known as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, the FEC said. This decision prompted questions such as whether restrictions on electioneering communications are constitutionally valid and whether Citizens United's action rightfully triggered those restrictions.

Those might seem like niche questions, but when the squabble got to the Supreme Court, the justices broadened the scope of the case.

The Court said it wanted to examine not only a piece of a 2003 decision, McConnell v. FEC, that upheld the electioneering communication provision of BCRA, but also at a 1990 precedent, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which underpins rules limiting how corporations can spend on elections. Laws upheld by Austin prevent corporations from dipping into their own deep pockets --rather than those of their much smaller PACs-- to support or oppose candidates.

Advocates of campaign finance rules fear that if the Court issues the broadest of decisions, overturning both Austin and the provision of McConnell, a new torrent of campaign ad spending will be unleashed as corporations spend without limit to impact elections.

Still, the Court could hand down a narrower ruling that has less impact on the campaign finance system. Its decision could speak specifically to the facts of the original incident or it could look at the two precedents in different lights, rather than taking a blanket approach.