The Roberts Court Knocks Down One of the Last Campaign Finance Rules

The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down yet another campaign finance restriction in what has become its years-long aim to obliterate regulations governing money in politics. In a decision that broke down along party lines, the six Republican appointees lifted limits on how much parties and candidates could spend in coordination with each other. The decision will effectively allow wealthy donors to circumvent caps on direct giving to candidates by routing funds through the party, which can now spend the entire sum in coordination with the candidate. The majority’s decision, authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, hangs the ruling on the First Amendment. To restrict how a political party coordinates with one of its candidates—whether to consult on an ad or to pay the pizza bill—now infringes on the party’s free speech rights. To reach this conclusion, the majority overruled both Congress’ judgment about how to stop political corruption and its own precedent in a case just 25 years ago. “The political party coordinated-expenditure limits impose a ‘stifling effect on the ability of the party to do what it exists to do,'” Kavanaugh wrote, arguing that the coordination limits imposed by Congress some 50 years ago are too burdensome. In a dissent joined by the Democratic appointees, Justice Elena Kagan warned that the decision endangers our democratic system of government. As it has in other campaign finance cases, she wrote, the majority “jettisons a rule needed to protect our democracy’s integrity.” Indeed, with Tuesday’s opinion in NRSC v. FEC, the Roberts Court has, once again, nullified Congress’ judgment about how to stop corruption and given wealthy donors another vehicle to influence elections and extract favors from politicians. Thanks to the court’s past rulings, our elections are already defined by massive spending from the ultra-wealthy and our politics is already reoriented toward repaying those oligarchs for their donations. Though the Federal Election Commission announced after Trump’s inauguration it would not enforce the coordination limits struck down today, the ruling is a green light to both rich donors and candidates that their cozy relationship can become even closer. Just by looking at the case docket, it’s clear that this case was a partisan brawl where the Republican-appointed justices threw in with the Republican Party. On one side were the GOP party committees, the sitting vice president, and the Trump administration, all urging the court to strike down the limits. In amicus briefs, conservative organizations funded by GOP-backing billionaires like Charles Koch joined their political allies. A win would allow these billionaires to have more influence over politicians, and for the politicians to get more money in return. The Roberts Court appears endlessly solicitous of both these groups. On the case’s other side were a handful of left-coded good government groups, Democratic politicians, and the Democratic National Committee. While some billionaires give to Democrats, Republicans receive a much larger slice of the billionaire pie. The New York Times recently found that in the 2024 election, Republicans took in five times as much as Democrats from billionaire donors. Congress passed the Federal Election Campaign Act just ahead of the Watergate scandal, then amended it after President Richard Nixon’s quid pro quo with the dairy industry came to light as part of the Watergate investigation. Over many decades, the Supreme Court has eroded the anti-corruption limits that Congress enacted in this era. The Roberts court has knocked down limits on outside political spending, creating a free-for-all of super PAC and nonprofit election spending. Corruption and outsize influence from the wealthiest has predictably followed. In today’s opinion, the court turns to restrictions on donations that, effectively, go directly to candidates and starts to dismantle those. After Watergate, Congress realized that if it wanted to limit how much money an individual could give to a campaign, it also needed to restrict how much parties could spend in coordination with a candidate to prevent circumvention of that limit. After today’s decision, one of the last remaining pieces of Congress’ anti-corruption campaign finance laws is a limit on how much individuals can give to parties. For now, that means that technically there remains a ceiling on the amount of money a donor can route to a candidate through the party apparatus. But that number is still high. In her dissent, Kagan lays out how the decision allows donors to get around the individual contribution limit, now $7,000 for both a primary and general election campaign. The majority enables “a party to serve as an alternative checking account for a campaign,” she writes. “As a result, a donor will be able to give a party as much as half a million dollars (as compared to the $7,000 he can give directly to the candidate) to cover the candidate’s bills.” The remaining aggregate limits on how much people can give parties and directly to candidates will almost certainly become the next targets of Republicans and their wealthy allies. In fact, during oral arguments, the attorney for the GOP political committees, former solicitor general Noel Francisco, admitted as much. For decades, this Supreme Court has repeatedly blocked Congress’ attempts to limit outside political spending which is ostensibly—though not in reality—independent from the candidate and therefore uncoordinated. But it has repeatedly upheld Congress’ ability to limit direct payments to candidates, including through parties, as part of Congress’ power to limit quid pro quo corruption schemes. Tuesday’s ruling argues that there are other avenues to combat corruption that are less burdensome on First Amendment rights: namely that records of donations to parties are available for people to find online. It’s hard to see how that sort of disclosure will stop an exchange of favors for donations, but the majority thinks it’s enough. Not only does the majority use the First Amendment to attack the integrity of our democratic system, but it also based its opinion on its members’ own policy preferences. Suffice to say, that’s Congress’ and the president’s job—not the court’s. Nonetheless, the opinion is overly concerned with the weakened status of political parties in relation to the massive figures flowing through outside super PACs and other independent dark money groups. What the court doesn’t admit is that it created this current imbalance, most notably in Citizens United, when it lifted outside spending limits on corporations and unions. To enact one policy due to the ill effects of another is Congress’ role—but in Tuesday’s opinion, the Supreme Court acts as a super legislature, responding to its own folly by pursing a new policy. Perhaps most galling, Kavanaugh lays the blame for the parties’ weakened state at the feet of the 2001 precedent he overturns, Colorado II, which 25 years ago upheld these coordination limits. “That one is rich,” Kagan rights in dissent. “If one is overruling—or just reversing—decisions on that ground, I can think of a couple of more obvious ones—that is, the ones that created the modern Super PAC system, and thus the complained-of imbalance,” she added, going on to reference Citizens United. Both Democrats and Republicans have been preparing for the court’s decision. In the short term, it is likely to change how they pay for television ads. By allowing coordination, the party expects to purchase ad time at a lower rate that is generally reserved for candidates, allowing them to buy more ads. After the midterms, this rule could result in more advertising and longer campaigns, as the parties’ dollars stretch further. So perhaps the most immediate consequence felt by voters will be an even greater barrage of ads. But in the long term, far more is at stake. The result, in Kagan’s words, is “a legal regime increasingly unable to stop political corruption, and thus to preserve our institutions’ democratic legitimacy.”