Supreme Court considers whether to lift campaign finance limits

AL DRAGO / NEW YORK TIMES

The U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on Monday

WASHINGTON >> The Supreme Court grappled today with whether to remove campaign finance limits in a major challenge to political campaign funding that could undercut one of the Democrats’ financial advantages going into the midterms.

The court’s liberal justices voiced skepticism about unraveling limitations during the arguments, which lasted more than two hours. The conservatives, who will probably decide the case, asked fewer, more muted questions, with key justices giving less of an indication on how they are likely to land when the court rules in the coming months.

The case comes against a backdrop of years of court decisions chipping away at legal limits on money in campaigns, after the court reshaped the political landscape in 2010 in the landmark Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case. In that case, the justices struck down legal limits on independent political spending by corporations and unions, allowing a flood of new money to enter politics.

The case heard today was brought by Republican groups and dealt with how much money political parties can spend in coordination with candidates. The law currently caps such spending. A lawyer for the groups, Noel J. Francisco, told the justices that those limits were “at war” with the court’s recent First Amendment cases because they restrict the ability of political groups to reach and influence voters.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor pushed back on his argument and said she was wary of the Supreme Court wading further into campaign finance laws enacted by Congress.

“Every time we interfere with the congressional design, we make matters worse,” Sotomayor said. “Our tinkering causes more harm than it does good.”

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Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of the court’s conservatives, also raised concerns about some of the fallout of the court’s campaign finance decisions. He said he worried that “the combination of campaign finance laws and this court’s decisions over the years have together reduced the power of political parties as compared to outside groups, with negative effects on our constitutional democracy.”

But Kavanaugh also appeared sympathetic to arguments by the Republican groups regarding coordinated spending between candidates and parties.

Depending on its scope, a decision for Republicans in the case, National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, could swing the pendulum of power back toward the official political parties and away from super political action committees. It could also allow parties to spend huge sums from big donors directly on candidates, potentially expanding the influence of big money compared with small-dollar contributions. Democrats in recent years have done better than Republicans at winning smaller donations.

For that reason, experts say that a win for the Republicans would have an immediate practical impact for the midterms, shrinking one of the Democratic Party’s major financial advantages: lower costs for political candidates who directly buy broadcast advertising time.

Under federal law, broadcasters must offer political candidates low advertising rates. But they are not required to give super PACs those same low rates. Super PACs often pay double, triple and even four times as much money for the same TV spots as do candidates.

In recent years, Democratic candidates have tended to vastly out-raise Republican candidates, who have been more reliant on the support of super PACs and national party committees, which can accept larger donations. In practice, that means Democratic candidates have been able to take advantage of these lower ad rates more often than Republicans.

A ruling in the case is expected by July. If the court decides to allow unlimited spending by the parties in coordination with the candidates, party committees could suddenly have access to those cheaper rates, an outcome that campaign finance experts say would probably especially benefit Republicans and potentially save the GOP tens of millions of dollars next fall.

The ad price disparity is so big that Republicans have been testing various other ways to skirt the existing law while this challenge has been winding its way through the courts.

In 2026, the committees of both national parties that are focused on the House and Senate races will probably be financially closely matched. But the Republican National Committee itself has an edge over the Democratic National Committee, with far more cash on hand, about $91 million. The DNC recently had only $18 million on hand after taking out a $15 million loan.

Democrats would probably make it a huge priority to raise money for the party committees should Republicans win at the court, potentially making a GOP advantage short-lived.

The Federal Election Commission regularly updates limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates for each election cycle. According to court documents in the case, in the 2021-22 election cycle, the National Republican Senatorial Committee spent roughly $15.5 million on coordinated party expenditures with Republican Senate nominees, and the National Republican Congressional Committee spent roughly $8.3 million on coordinated party expenditures with Republican House nominees. These expenditures primarily funded political advertising.

While an individual donor can give only $3,500 to a candidate for both the primary and general election during an election cycle, a donor can give up to $44,300 to a national party committee’s general fund each year and hundreds of thousands more to specialty accounts.

The legal challenge to the spending limits was originally filed on the eve of the 2022 midterm elections in a very different political climate.

JD Vance, then an Ohio candidate for the Senate, along with Republican groups, sued to challenge the coordination limits. The Biden administration defended the existing campaign finance laws in the lower courts. A panel of federal appeals court judges sided with the Biden administration to uphold the current spending limits. Republican groups then asked the justices to weigh in.

After President Donald Trump took office, the federal government flipped sides in the case and began supporting the Republican groups.

Although the spending limits between party committees and candidates, established in 1974 in the wake of Watergate, had been previously upheld by the justices in 2001 in a case brought by Colorado Republicans, Deputy Solicitor General Sarah M. Harris argued today that precedent had been “demolished.”

Harris told the justices that the Trump administration viewed the current limitations as an important free speech issue.

“Regardless of how this works out in terms of who gets more money when, and who does what with the money, the bigger issue is, is there a restriction right now that is encroaching on truly central campaign speech?” Harris said. “And the answer to us is manifestly yes.”

She told the justices to “allow the First Amendment to do its work” and enable parties to coordinate with candidates on campaigns and to “let the chips fall where they may.”

The Trump administration’s position also meant that someone needed to argue on behalf of the current law. The court appointed a veteran Supreme Court litigator, Roman Martinez, who started his pitch to the justices by asserting that the Republican groups were asking the justices to overturn “50 years of campaign finance law” in “a highly politicized case.”

But he quickly pivoted from the constitutional claims to a threshold question. He argued that the only plaintiff with a direct stake in the dispute — a legal requirement to be able to sue called “standing” — was Vance.

Since Vance is not running for office and “has repeatedly denied having any concrete plan to run for office in 2028,” Martinez argued, the case was moot and should be dismissed.

Francisco, arguing on behalf of the Republican groups, countered that Vance was doing “what virtually every candidate for the presidency does,” which is “wait until after the midterm elections in order to announce his specific intentions.”

Democratic groups had also intervened in the case, and their lawyer, Marc E. Elias, told the justices that while the court has “appropriately” treated many campaign finance laws with skepticism, it has never wavered on a foundational point: “Congress may limit contributions to candidates.”

He urged the justices to uphold the current limitations, warning that allowing the political parties unfettered coordination with candidates would usher in a new system where political parties would pay all of the bills for candidates.

What the Republican groups wished to do, Elias asserted, was “to simply pay the bills of campaigns, bills that may not involve speech at all.”

He gave examples of invoices for flowers, electric bills or blocks of hotel rooms “in which the party may not even know that the bill was incurred until they receive the invoice and are told to dutifully pay it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2025 The New York Times Company

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