By Jan Wolfe
WASHINGTON, Dec 4 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court for decades has chipped away at campaign finance laws, deciding they suppress political speech in violation of constitutional protections. A case involving U.S. Vice President JD Vance being argued next week gives the court and its conservative majority a chance to amplify this trend.
Vance, who was running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio when the litigation began in 2022, and two Republican Party committees have appealed a lower court’s ruling upholding limits set by Congress in the 1970s on how much money political parties can spend in coordination with candidates for federal offices.
The Supreme Court is hearing arguments on Tuesday in the case, which could further reshape the U.S. campaign finance system by dismantling yet another spending limit at a time when critics argue that big-money donors already exert too much influence on American elections.
Republican President Donald Trump’s administration is supporting his vice president’s stance in the case. A ruling is expected by the end of June.
If history is any guide, the court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, is likely to rule in favor of the Republicans challenging the campaign finance regulation on free speech grounds, according to Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in California.
“For more than two decades, the Supreme Court has alternated between whittling away and bludgeoning campaign finance laws, finding many of those laws to violate the freedom of speech,” Levinson said.
CITIZENS UNITED RULING
The Supreme Court in a landmark 2010 ruling in a case called Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission allowed unlimited independent spending by corporations and other outside groups such as labor unions in election campaigns, finding that limits imposed by Congress violated rights to free speech under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.
That ruling paved the way for the creation of independent political action committees called “Super PACs” and other groups that could receive unlimited donations.
The court followed that up in 2014 by striking down limits on the overall amount an individual could spend on federal political contributions, also on First Amendment grounds.
In a 2022 ruling siding with Republican U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, the court struck down a federal campaign finance law that had limited how and when candidates can repay loans they made to their own campaigns, again citing the First Amendment.
Republicans often argue that these rulings have been unfairly vilified by liberals. They tout the decisions as a boost to political speech, which the Supreme Court already has determined merits the highest level of First Amendment protection.
The case being argued on Tuesday, called National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, involves a section of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, the bedrock of the U.S. campaign finance regime.
That law and its amendments, like the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, 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.
COORDINATED SPENDING
Under the Federal Election Campaign Act, spending by a political party to advocate for or against a candidate, but 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 seeking 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.
Congress enacted these limits to ensure that wealthy donors cannot circumvent limits on how much they can individually donate to candidates.
“If coordinated spending is allowed without limits, then parties can become conduits for big donors seeking to route money through the parties to their preferred candidates,” said Tara Malloy, a lawyer at the Washington-based Campaign Legal Center, an advocacy group supporting strong campaign finance regulation.
The Justice Department under both Democratic and Republican presidents had long defended limits on coordinated spending in court. The Supreme Court in 2001 found these limits constitutional. But campaign finance law has changed since then, and Republicans now want the 2001 precedent overturned.
In a 2022 lawsuit, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, National Republican Congressional Committee, Vance and Republican former congressman Steve Chabot sought a court order blocking the Federal Election Commission from enforcing limits on coordinated party expenditures.
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.”
In the Supreme Court’s 2014 campaign finance ruling in a case called McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, it declared preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption as the only legitimate government interest in regulating campaign finance.
Dan Backer, the conservative lawyer who played a major role in the First Amendment challenge in the McCutcheon case, said that decision shows why the court now needs to overturn its 2001 precedent and strike down limits on coordinated spending.
“It makes no sense that a political party can corrupt its own candidates,” Backer said. “The party exists to nominate and elect candidates.”
Because Trump’s Justice Department has declined to defend the federal law at issue in the Vance case, a court-appointed lawyer, Roman Martinez, will do so. Martinez has argued that the limits on coordinated spending are sensible, carefully written and consistent with free speech protections.
“The use of political parties as conduits to evade base limits and facilitate corruption is not speculative or hypothetical,” Martinez wrote in a court filing. “It’s a real-world problem, as reflected in evidence from the 1970s to the present day.”
Martinez also has offered several jurisdictional arguments for why the Supreme Court should dismiss the suit by Vance and the others without deciding the case on the legal merits.
Malloy called these arguments an attractive “off-ramp” for the justices if they are reluctant to take the step of overturning another precedent.
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham)
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