Summary
There are a lot of cases that the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John Roberts since 2005, loves to take on; cases involving the First and Second Amendments, executive power overreach, and voting protections. But one of the most consistently targeted topics by SCOTUS is the issue of campaign finance.
Amid a slew of consequential Supreme Court decisions that did not go President Donald Trump’s way in late June, there was one decision that most certainly did. In National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court struck down that coordinated spending limits between candidates and political parties.
The decision, made in a 6-3 vote along party lines, of course, was largely overshadowed by other decisions regarding birthright citizenship and transgender athletes. But it has the potential to drastically shift the future of campaign finance.
The Supreme Court’s seeming vendetta against campaign finance restrictions is not new, as this court is also responsible for the infamous Citizens United ruling. With that in mind, it is vital to understand what role this decision plays in politics and why it is happening now.
Analysis
Now, it is important to take a moment to look at how this case fits into the shifting legal landscape regarding campaign expenditure limits. The issue at this case’s heart involves the limits on how much political parties can donate to their candidates.
On the surface, this seems like a non-issue. Parties should, in theory, be allowed to support their own candidates financially without too much hassle. However, coordination between parties and candidates is often considered corruption because it creates a legal loophole that allows wealthy donors to bypass strict individual contribution limits.
Following the post-Watergate reform rush, legislators knew this was a risk because they had just seen the political “slush funds” Nixon used to fund the Watergate break-in. Thus, campaign expenditure caps on donations from parties were first instituted in 1974. Funny how slush funds are also apparently trying to make a comeback, but that’s an issue that has been sidelined for now.
Anyways, many took umbrage with those limits because they interpreted money as an extension of free speech, and this argument became ingrained in legal circles by a 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo. This was the first case to say that campaign expenditures were a type of “speech” and that the only permissible justification for most limits on money in politics was to prevent outright bribery.
Keep this argument in mind, as it will continue to play a part in SCOTUS decisions once 2005 hits.
Buckley V. Valeo ended with a decision that upheld restrictions on individual contributions but struck down restrictions of independent expenditures in campaigns because they violated the First Amendment. So now we have a limit on donations from political parties to campaigns, but an old court case in Buckley V. Valeo pushed an argument that those limits are only needed to counter corruption and introduced the First Amendment aspect.
Regardless, those donation limits from parties were part of the bedrock of campaign finance legislation. But at the turn of the millennium, cracks started to appear.
In 2001, SCOTUS heard Federal Election Commission v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee, henceforth referred to as Colorado II. In an eerily similar case to this summer’s, the Supreme Court faced an argument by the CRFCC that donation limits were unconstitutional by violating the first amendment.
That court, however, ruled 5-4 that the government could constitutionally limit how much money political parties spend in direct coordination with federal candidates. This ruling was based on three key reasons.
Firstly, coordinated party expenditures, as mentioned earlier, are “functionally equivalent” to direct cash donations. Secondly, limits were necessary to prevent donors from using political parties to bypass separate limits on individual contributions targeting individual contributions to candidates. Finally, the court deemed that all those restrictions did not unduly infringe upon the First Amendment rights of political parties.
Again, these limits were upheld by the Supreme Court. In many eyes, the issue was deemed settled. The justices even wrote, after testimony from political scientists, that “despite years of enforcement of the challenged limits, substantial evidence demonstrates how candidates, donors, and parties test the limits of the current law, and it shows beyond serious doubt how contribution limits would be eroded if inducement to circumvent them were enhanced by declaring parties’ coordinated spending wide open.”
Remember this quote, and how the court agreed that there is an active effort to circumvent these laws.
Now we have all the background needed to understand the case at hand, NRSC v. FEC. It began back in 2022, when the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), then-Senator J.D. Vance, and former-Representative Steve Chabot sued the FEC on the grounds that limits on party-coordinated expenditures violate the First Amendment.
In this instance, those limits prevented those two committees, which are also the two primary Republican fundraising organizations, from coordinating with the Vance and Chabot campaigns. As a result, they allege that both the parties’ and candidates’ free speech were violated.
The case was filed in the Southern District of Ohio before being sent to the Sixth Circuit. Here, the judge ruled in favor of the FEC. Once again it was appealed, but it wasn’t until mid 2025 that the case made it to the Supreme Court.
Going into the decision, there was a lot of worry about the future of the campaign-party donation limits. So when the 6-3 decision was handed down, scholars flocked to the written opinions to see how the overturning was justified. And they were quite mixed.
The Supreme Court majority’s opinion, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, called the limits a “severe infringement on First Amendment-protected political speech.” This isn’t a new belief, but he also arguedthat eliminating the limits could bolster political parties generally by giving them more spending power in comparison to political action committees (PACs). On the surface, this argument holds some water, but time will tell if this rings true or if it’s merely dressing for the decision.
However, the most baffling part of the majority opinion was that those party coordination caps were unnecessary and unduly restricted free speech because direct contribution limits and other rules, such as disclosure requirements, are enough to prevent corruption.
This is in direct contradiction to the 2001 Supreme Court ruling. Given the $4.3 billion in spending during the 2024 cycle by “dark” money organizations that don’t have to disclose their donors, this seems like a callous and naive decision. In 2024, about a third of the super PAC spending in support of President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris traced back to such organizations.
In the dissenting opinion, written by Justice Elena Kagan, the dissenting judges see the threat posed by this decision. Kagan says that “the majority … jettisons a rule needed to protect our democracy’s integrity.” By using the other measures in place to pick up the slack, Kavanaugh and the majority “ushers in the same opportunities for quid pro quo corruption that the contribution limits were meant to check.”
All of these limits are meant to create a comprehensive wall against corruption. While Kavanaugh seems to think that the other mechanisms will pick up the slack after the striking-down of these limits, the result will likely be yet another gap in the campaign finance wall that has been chipped at for two decades by this Supreme Court.
So, what does this mean for the midterms? Overall, it means that a huge influx of money is about to hit important races this November.
Democrats have largely had the advantage in candidate fundraising thus far. But the Republican campaign committees, like the NRSC, have tended to out-raise
their Democratic counterparts while the DNC has struggled to keep up with the
RNC’s massive fundraising statistics. With this SCOTUS decision, those Republican campaign committees have more leeway to spend money on their candidates.
This massive influx of money is especially evident in races like U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff’s re-election campaign in Georgia. Ossoff’s seat is one of the most competitive in this cycle, as he won his 2020 campaign by a mere 1.2% after a runoff. This time around, he has raised an enormous amount of money that now may not mean as much as it might have.
$82 million raised in the first 4 months of the year showcases Ossoff’s fundraising prowess. It includes $33 million in cash in hand, dwarfing opponent Mike Collin’s roughly $1.7 million in hand. Now, with all of the money that the Republican party gets from corporate backers can be used to pick up the difference.
This is the story across the country. While Democrats have cash advantages in tight Senate races such as Georgia and Texas, they are now more evenly matched thanks to the Supreme Court.
With the midterm elections beginning to pick up steam, the investment from both sides in their candidates will follow suit. And with more money comes higher stakes, and with higher stakes comes a bare-knuckle brawl of an election season. While it is never quite a cordial affair, the influence of special interests and the wealthy just got even more intense.
The fate of the back-half of Trump’s presidency lies with who controls Congress, and the Supreme Court just made it easier for his rich and powerful allies to tip the scales in his favor.
Take Action
- The Brennan Center for Justice is an American liberal nonprofit law and public policy institute focused on Democratic and justice-related reforms.
- End Citizens United is a single-issue grassroots PAC focused entirely on overturning Citizens United and countering the influence of dark money in elections.
- OpenSecrets is a premier nonpartisan, independent nonprofit organization that tracks and publishes comprehensive data on money in American politics.