Supreme Court weighs further loosening campaign finance limits
The Supreme Court on Tuesday wrestled over whether to lift limits on how much political parties can spend in cooperation with candidates. The case could significantly shift the balance of political power between the parties and outside groups such as Super PACs.
Republican leaders are asking the court to remove limits on how much parties can spend in coordination with federal candidates on items such as advertisements and campaign expenses. They say the existing limits hinder the parties’ free-speech rights and put parties in a weaker position than the outside groups.
The Democratic Party opposes that bid, arguing that lifting limits on party spending would lead to a greater potential for quid pro quo corruption, allowing wealthy donors to dodge individual contribution limits by donating through parties instead.
Individuals can give $3,500 per election to a candidate but can give $44,300 per year to a national party committee. Supporters of the existing limits argue that allowing parties to spend unlimited amounts in coordination with a candidate would give donors much more opportunity to curry favor with candidates.
Other experts and reform groups, however, say allowing parties to spend unlimited amounts on candidates could counter the influence of groups such as Super PACs, which are often criticized for fueling polarization.
The court’s liberal justices appeared most concerned about the ramifications of lifting the restrictions. Justice Sonia Sotomayor attacked the arguments from Republican lawyers who said there is no evidence that wealthy donors launder money through political parties to give to candidates in return for favors.
“If there’s a lack of evidence, it means our umbrella is working,” Sotomayor said, adding Republicans are now asking the court to “take that umbrella completely away.”
Sotomayor at one point seemed to suggest that Elon Musk, President Donald Trump’s largest donor in the 2024 presidential campaign, got his job leading the U.S. DOGE Service through a quid pro quo.
“You mean to suggest that the fact that one major donor to the current president, the most major donor to the current president got a very lucrative job immediately upon election from the new administration does not give the appearance of a quid pro quo?” Sotomayor asked Noel Francisco, the lawyer representing the Republican Party.
Francisco, who served as the government’s top Supreme Court advocate during Trump’s first administration, said he didn’t think the salary Musk received from the government job was “effective quid pro quo bribery.”
“Maybe not the salary, but certainly the lucrative government contracts might be,” Sotomayor said.
Conservative justices were comparatively silent on that issue, focusing instead on whether Democrats and Republicans have been aligned on lifting the limits. But Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said he was concerned about the potential for quid pro quo corruption if the court lifted the limits. He also noted that if the court struck down coordinated spending limits, it could lead to challenges on how much donors can contribute to parties. Kavanaugh noted that was the “real source of the disadvantage” of parties compared to Super PACs.
“I assume you think they’re not constitutional—and that in a future case … you would argue those limits on parties are not constitutional,” Kavanaugh said to Francisco.
Over the past two decades, the Supreme Court has greatly loosened campaign finance regulations. In the 2010 Citizens United decision, the court ruled that corporations and other outside groups can spend unlimited amounts on candidates. Four years later, the court lifted the cap on how much wealthy donors can give to federal candidates, political parties and committees.
Currently, the amount political parties can spend in coordination with candidates on advertisements is capped.
Vice President JD Vance and congressional Republicans are asking the high court to eliminate those limits. They say spending caps restrain parties’ constitutional free-speech rights. Republicans also argue that the current spending limits are obsolete in light of the Supreme Court’s previous loosening of campaign finance restrictions.
In 2022, Vance and Republican leaders sued the Federal Election Commission when Vance was running for an Ohio senate seat. They asked the Supreme Court to hear the case last year after a lower court upheld the coordinated party spending limits.
The Supreme Court will probably strike down the coordinated spending limits, campaign finance experts predict, given the court’s prior willingness to lift restrictions.
Critics of the existing limits say they have increased the clout of outside groups, like Super PACs. “[W]hen outside groups have more influence, the legislative process becomes more dysfunctional,” New York University law professors Richard Pildes and Bob Bauer wrote in a June article about potential ramifications of Tuesday case.
They noted that lifting limits on how much parties can spend in coordination could strengthen parties and foster stability. And with the rise of outside political spending, a challenge to coordinated spending limits was “inevitable,” Pildes and Bauer wrote.
Super PACs dominate American elections, taking on many of the campaign tasks traditionally handled by candidates and parties. In the 2024 election, independent expenditures made up more than a quarter of total spending—up from 3 percent in 2008—driven by super PACs such as the pro-Trump MAGA Inc., according to a Post analysis of OpenSecrets data.
Wealthy donors also dominate elections. Since 2000, political giving by the wealthiest 100 Americans to federal elections has gone up almost 140 times, well outpacing the growing costs of campaigns, a Washington Post analysis found. In 2000, the country’s wealthiest 100 people donated about a quarter of 1 percent of the total cost of federal elections, according to a Post analysis of data from OpenSecrets, which tracks federal spending.
By 2024, they covered about 7.5 percent, even as the cost of such elections soared. In other words, roughly 1 in 13 dollars spent in last year’s national elections was donated by a handful of the country’s richest people.
Beth Reinhard contributed to this report.
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