Washington — The Supreme Court said Monday that it will consider whether federal limits on coordinated spending by political parties in support of their candidates violate the First Amendment.
The court’s review of an appeals court ruling that upheld the coordinated spending limits set up a high-stakes campaign finance dispute that will be heard in the court’s next term, with a decision expected just months before the 2026 midterm elections. The Supreme Court allowed the Democratic National Committee and other party committees to intervene and participate in the case, since the Justice Department has joined the GOP in calling on the court to strike down the restrictions as unconstitutional.
The case is likely to join a string of recent rulings from the Supreme Court’s conservative majority that have unraveled campaign finance limits as violations of the First Amendment, allowing more money to flow into politics. In its landmark 2010 decision in the case Citizens United v. FEC, the justices struck down prohibitions on political spending by corporations. Four years later, the high court invalidated a limit on the amount of money a donor could contribute to federal candidates in a two-year election cycle.
In the latest case, which involved GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that a cap on the amount of post-election contributions that can be used to repay a candidate who loaned money to their own campaign was unconstitutional.
The dispute before the Supreme Court now, brought by Republican political committees and JD Vance when he was a candidate for the Senate, involves a 50-year-old provision of the Federal Election Campaign Act that restricts the amount of money political parties can spend in coordination with their candidates during a campaign. For 2024, the limits on coordinated spending by party committees were from $123,600 to $3.7 million for Senate candidates, and between $61,800 and $123,600 for House candidates.
In 2022, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, Vance and then-Rep. Steve Chabot of Ohio challenged the constitutionality of the coordinated party expenditure limits. Chabot lost his reelection bid in November 2022.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit upheld the limits under a 2001 Supreme Court decision that rejected a challenge to an earlier version of the restrictions. The composition of the high court has changed significantly in the 24 years since that decision, and it now has a 6-3 conservative majority. Justice Clarence Thomas, who dissented from the 2001 ruling, is the only justice who is still on the court.
In its decision, the 6th Circuit’s 10-judge majority acknowledged that “the law and facts have changed” since the 2001 ruling and said “political campaigns and political spending have changed in the last two decades.”
The Republicans appealed to the Supreme Court and urged it to strike down the limits on coordinated spending as a violation of the First Amendment. They are represented by two lawyers with ties to President Trump: Noel Francisco, who was solicitor general during his first term, and Don McGahn, who served as White House counsel.
“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,” they wrote in their appeal. “That is the campaign ‘equivalent of prohibiting communication between a coach and quarterback late in a tied game.'”
The Republicans urged the Supreme Court to either clarify its 2001 decision upholding the spending limits or overrule it outright, calling it an “aberration” that was “plainly wrong the day it was decided.”
Because political parties cannot coordinate with their candidates, the GOP committees said donors are directing more of their money to outside groups like superPACs.
“The result is a more polarized process in which political parties — an institutional force almost as old as ‘the formation of the Republic itself’ — have been supplanted by less-restricted speakers,” they said.
Backing the Republicans in their appeal is the Trump administration, which is not defending the law before the Supreme Court. In a May filing with the justices, Solicitor General D. John Sauer said the government agrees that the expenditure limits violate the First Amendment by restricting parties’ right to engage in political speech in coordination with their candidates.
“The core function of a political party is to promote its candidates to the electorate. A party performs that function most effectively in cooperation with the candidates themselves,” Sauer wrote. “By restricting that cooperation, the party-expenditure limit severely burdens the rights of parties and candidates alike.”
The Justice Department has a longstanding policy of defending federal statutes facing constitutional challenges, but Sauer said it determined “this is the rare case that warrants an exception to that general approach.”
Because the government sided with the Republicans in arguing that the limits should be invalidated, Democratic Party committees sought to intervene because there was no one to defend the law and the 6th Circuit’s decision. The Justice Department did not oppose their intervention.
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