The Supreme Court on Tuesday used the GOP Senate campaign finance lawsuit to abolish limits on how much political parties can spend directly coordinating with candidates. The 6-3 ruling lets party money pay for campaign activity such as advertisements or rallies, changing the rules before the November midterms.
J.D. Vance, the former senator and now the vice president, joined the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the challenge on First Amendment grounds. The court agreed that the old caps on party-candidate coordination infringed on the First Amendment rights of the parties and candidates.
Tuesday and the spending caps
Before the ruling, parties were limited to spending between $65,300 and $130,600 on an individual House candidate. For an individual Senate candidate, the limit ran from $130,600 to $4,071,800. A presidential candidate could draw up to $32,392,200 under the old rules. Those limits had forced parties to separate their own spending from the most direct form of campaign support.
The decision changes that structure. Party funds can now be used more directly for candidate campaign activity, which matters because the ruling is widely expected to help Republicans use large donations to the party to offset the fundraising advantage that individual Democratic candidates typically have.
Mike Ambrosini at the RNC
At the end of May, the Republican National Committee had $125.5 million in cash on hand. The Democratic National Committee had $14.9 million in cash on hand and $18.3 million in debt. Mike Ambrosini, the RNC chief of staff, said the litigation was “one of the main reasons that anyone that is a Republican should not write our obituary in June.”
President Donald Trump called the court’s ruling Tuesday a “BIG WIN FOR REPUBLICANS.” Liberal justices warned that wealthy donors can now give larger sums to parties to boost their chosen candidate, even though federal earmarking rules still prohibit donors from saying money given to a party should be spent on a specific candidate.
That leaves the practical route for money shifted, not unlimited. Parties can now coordinate more directly with candidates, but how Democrats will adapt and how parties and donors will route money under the new rules is not explained.
