The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down federal limits on how much political parties may spend in coordination with candidates, issuing a major campaign finance ruling that expands the role of party spending in elections.
The justices ruled 6-3 in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission that the coordinated spending limits violate the First Amendment. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion.
The decision overruled the court’s ruling from 2001 in Federal Election Commission v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee, which upheld the same restrictions in a 5-4 decision.
Kavanaugh wrote that the ruling “treats all political parties equally” and will allow parties, including the Democratic National Committee, Republican National Committee and congressional campaign committees, to “participate more freely and compete more fully in the political process” while coordinating more closely with their candidates.
Justice Elena Kagan dissented, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Kagan said the majority “rewrites the rules” to allow donors to bypass contribution limits and “jettisons a rule needed to protect our democracy’s integrity.”
The limits at issue are part of the Federal Election Campaign Act. The case was brought in 2022 by then-Sen. JD Vance, then-Rep. Steve Chabot of Ohio, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee.
The challengers argued that the limits violated the First Amendment by preventing party committees from working with candidates to align campaign messaging in advertisements.
The full 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the restrictions. Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton wrote that the challengers had raised valid points, but said the appeals court was bound by the Supreme Court’s 2001 ruling.
After the challengers asked the Supreme Court to take the case, the Trump administration agreed that the limits violated the First Amendment and urged the justices to intervene. Because the federal government was no longer defending the law, the court appointed attorney Roman Martinez, a former clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts and then-Judge Kavanaugh, to defend the restrictions.
Writing for the majority, Kavanaugh said the court’s campaign finance precedents allow restrictions only to prevent quid pro quo corruption, meaning contributions exchanged for official action. Supporters of the spending limits argued that they were needed to stop donors from skirting contribution caps by giving money to political parties with instructions to spend it on specific candidates, a practice known as earmarking.
Kavanaugh rejected that argument, saying other federal measures already address that risk, including base contribution limits, laws treating earmarked donations as candidate contributions and disclosure requirements.
He also noted that most states do not impose similar coordinated spending limits and said no evidence of corruption through circumvention had emerged. By contrast, he wrote, the federal limits place a “severe and direct restriction” on political speech and violate core First Amendment protections.
Kavanaugh said the 2001 decision was no longer controlling, comparing it to “a three-legged stool where all three legs have already been knocked out.” He said the earlier ruling’s rationale had been rejected by later cases and was no longer good law under the court’s more recent precedents.
In dissent, Kagan warned that the ruling “ushers in the same opportunities for quid pro quo corruption that the contribution limits were meant to check.” She said donors would now be able to give a political party as much as $500,000 to cover a candidate’s expenses, compared with the $7,000 they may give directly to a candidate, and that candidates could seek such donations.
