By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear a Republican-led challenge on free speech grounds to a provision of federal campaign finance law that limits spending by political parties in coordination with candidates running for office in a case involving Vice President JD Vance.
The justices took up an appeal by two Republican committees and Vance, who was running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio when the litigation began, of a lower court’s ruling that upheld restrictions on the amount of money parties can spend on campaigns with input from candidates they support.
The justices are due to hear the case in their next term, which begins in October.
Republican President Donald Trump’s administration filed a court brief backing the Republican committees and Vance, who is now serving as his vice president. Lawyers for the Justice Department urged the Supreme Court to take up the case and appoint a third party to defend the lower court’s ruling in place of the Justice Department.
At issue in the case is whether federal limits on coordinated campaign spending violate the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protection against government abridgment of freedom of speech.
The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 and its amendments regulate fundraising and spending in U.S. elections by limiting the amount of money that people, groups and political parties can contribute or spend on a candidate, with the aim of preventing corruption.
Under that law, spending that is made by a political party to advocate for or against a candidate, but is not coordinated with a candidate’s campaign, is considered an “independent expenditure” not subject to amount limitations.
Spending that is coordinated between a party and a campaign, however, is restricted by the law and varies based on the population of the state where the candidate is running for office, lower in states with smaller populations and higher in those with larger populations. In 2024, limits ranged from around $123,000 to $3.7 million for Senate candidates and from around $62,000 to $123,000 for House of Representatives candidates, according to court papers.
In a 2022 lawsuit, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, National Republican Congressional Committee, Vance and former Republican congressman Steve Chabot of Ohio sought a court order blocking the Federal Election Commission from enforcing limits on so-called “coordinated party expenditures.” Vance was running for a Senate seat in Ohio at the time.
The plaintiffs argued that the limits “severely restrict political party committees from doing what the First Amendment entitles them to do: fully associate with and advocate for their own candidates for federal office.”
The Cincinnati-based U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in a 2024 ruling upheld the limits on coordinated campaign expenditures, concluding that they comported with the Constitution. The 6th Circuit in its ruling said it was required to follow a 2001 ruling by the Supreme Court arising from Colorado that addressed the very same issue.
On appeal, the plaintiffs told the Supreme Court that developments in campaign finance over the intervening decades, including shifts in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, have eroded the rationale underlying the 2001 ruling in the Colorado case and urged the justices to consider overruling it. Vance was vice president-elect when the appeal was filed in December 2024.
Three Democratic groups – the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee – asked to intervene to defend the 6th Circuit’s decision.
In a landmark decision on campaign finance in a case called Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court in 2010 enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections, striking down federal limits on independent expenditures as a violation of the First Amendment.
(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)
