The United States Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Tuesday that limitations on “coordinated party expenditures,” or money spent by a political party at the direction of a particular candidate, violate the First Amendment.
Dissenting from the majority were Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the majority opinion stated that because there are alternative measures in place to prevent the kind of corruption that these restrictions purported to protect against, extraordinary, speech-infringing measures are not needed.
It is also pointed out that there is no significant evidence of such corruption in states where these kinds of restrictions are not in place for state-level elections.
“It will allow all political parties—including the DNC and RNC and the respective Senate and House campaign committees, as well as other parties and party committees—to participate more freely and compete more fully in the political process, and to coordinate more closely with their candidates,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote.
Justice Kagan argued in the dissenting opinion that the majority “rewrites the rules, to allow circumvention of the contribution limits,” and in doing so “jettisons a rule needed to protect our democracy’s integrity.”
“[This ruling] ushers in the same opportunities for quid pro quo corruption that the contribution limits were meant to check,” Kagan said. “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. And the candidate can seek just such a donation.”
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Originally brought several years ago by the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), former Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH), and then-Senator — now Vice President — J.D. Vance, this case challenges these restrictions on the grounds that they represent a violation of the First Amendment.
When this challenge was before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, it was concluded that the court was bound by the Supreme Court’s 2001 ruling in FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee, preventing them from considering the possibility of overturning the regulations.
Taking place over the course of about a decade and a half, FEC stemmed from a series of radio ads that ran in April of 1986 and cost a total of $15,000.
Following some preliminary back and forth related to the specifics of the underlying situation, a First Amendment challenge emerged with respect to the limitations placed on coordinated party expenditures.
When the case finally reached the Supreme Court for a second time many years later in 2001, the Justices ruled that the restrictions were constitutional on the grounds that they serve to help “minimize circumvention of [individual] contribution limits.”
Consequently, regulation of coordinated party expenditures has remained permissible for nearly twenty-five years.
With their ruling in this case, however, the Justices have overruled this precedent, finding that such limits are a violation of the First Amendment, comparing the ruling to “a three-legged stool where all three legs have already been knocked out.”
“[The reasoning behind that ruling] has been rejected by subsequent cases and is no longer good law in light of the Court’s more recent precedents,” the Court said.
