By: Justin Jouvenal, Beth Reinhard
The Supreme Court will hear a significant campaign finance case next term that will examine whether it violates the Constitution to restrict the amount of money that political parties can spend in coordination with individual candidates on advertising and other communications.
The case has the potential to reshape election spending in a major way. The restrictions being challenged were established in the early ’70s during the Nixon era to try to prevent donors from contributing to parties as a way to skirt limits on direct giving to candidates.
Richard H. Pildes, a New York University law professor, said ending the limits could shift the balance of financial might from outside groups that have come to dominate campaign spending to political parties that were once the major players.
“It would at a minimum open up more opportunities for political parties to work with their campaigns,” Pildes said. “More expansively, it could lead to political parties regaining some of the ground they lost to the Super PACs over the last 20 years.”
The national Republican senatorial and congressional committees, joined by then-Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and then-Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio), filed suit over the limits in 2022, saying they conflict with the free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.
The Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled against the Republicans, citing a 2001 Supreme Court ruling upholding the limits, but it acknowledged the high court “has tightened the free speech restrictions on campaign finance regulation” in more recent decisions so the issue might be ripe for revisiting.
In the 2001 case, the high court upheld the restrictions on coordinating spending by political parties in a 5-4 ruling, finding they “minimize circumvention of [individual] contribution limits.”
The GOP committees urged the high court to overturn that decision in a filing, arguing that the restrictions have “harmed our political system by leading donors to send their funds elsewhere,” fueling the rise of super PACs and a decline in the power of political parties and contributing to “a spike in political polarization and fragmentation across the board.”
“Congress has built a wall of separation between party and candidate, forcing party committees to figure out how to get their candidates elected without hearing from them,” the petitioners wrote. “That is the campaign ‘equivalent of prohibiting communication between a coach and quarterback late in a tied game.’”
Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in a filing in the case that the Trump administration will not defend the restrictions on party spending. The move is unusual because the solicitor general typically defends federal law.
The high court is allowing the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) to intervene in the case to defend the contribution limits, which the groups say are an essential part of trying to restrict the influence of wealthy donors on the political process.
The Democratic groups argue in a brief filed with the courts that removing the limits could lead to corruption by “blow[ing] open the cap on the amount of money that donors can funnel to candidates through party committees’ coordinated expenditures.”
For 2025, the Federal Election Commission limited how much parties are able to spend in coordination with a Senate nominee to between about $127,000 and $3.9 million, depending on the size of a state’s voting-age population. For House candidates, the limits are between about $63,000 and $127,000. Parties face no limits on expenditures that are not coordinated with candidates.
The high court’s decision to accept the case was a major blow to advocates for campaign finance regulation. Since the court’s landmark 2010 decision in Citizens United, which opened the door to unlimited contributions by corporations and unions, the conservative majority has consistently viewed limits on campaign spending as unconstitutional limits on free speech.
If the court strikes down the current restrictions on coordinated spending by political parties – as expected by activists on both sides of the debate – it will be the latest in a series of rulings eroding the campaign finance regulations enacted in the wake of Watergate to guard against the potentially corrupting influence of money in politics.
“This case is part of a long line of cases in which this court has set out to eviscerate campaign finance laws passed over decades to protect the American people from corruption,” said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan group that backs stronger regulation of campaign spending. “This court is on a path that is completely hostile to campaign finance laws.”
Most states don’t restrict the amounts that parties can spend in coordination with candidates, said David Keating, president of the Institute for Free Speech, which filed a brief supporting the Republican committees’ request for the high court’s involvement.
“This case is a complete outlier and this is long overdue,” Keating said. “There is no evidence that it will lead to corruption, so I think it’s extremely unlikely the court will uphold this restriction.”
The case is one of seven that the justices added Monday to their calendar for the term that begins in October. The court also agreed to take up a major copyright dispute between Cox Communications and a group of music labels seeking to hold the internet service provider accountable for alleged illegal downloading of music by Cox customers.
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Ann E. Marimow contributed to this report.
