By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON, June 30 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court has again struck down campaign spending limits, this time rejecting on Tuesday federal restrictions on coordinated spending between political parties and their candidates on free speech grounds.
The ruling comes as major Republican committees head toward the November midterm elections with a significant cash advantage over their Democratic counterparts.
Siding with Vice President JD Vance and other Republican challengers, the court ruled 6-3 that a cap on the amount of money parties can spend on campaigns with input from candidates violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protections against government abridgment of freedom of speech.
Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who authored the ruling, wrote that “constitutional text, history and precedent establish that the political-party coordinated-expenditure limits violate the First Amendment.” The court’s six conservative justices were in the majority, while its three liberal justices dissented.
The court overruled its 2001 decision in a case arising from Colorado that had addressed the very same issue. Tuesday’s ruling determined that developments in campaign finance over the intervening decades, including shifts in the court’s jurisprudence, eroded the rationale underlying that prior ruling.
The Supreme Court issued its ruling with the November midterm elections looming, as President Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans seek to retain control of Congress.
‘A BIG WIN’
Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform after the ruling: “The Supreme Court just took restrictions off political spending! A BIG WIN FOR REPUBLICANS and, more importantly, The First Amendment!”
Liberal Justice Elena Kagan, in a dissent joined by the court’s two other liberal members, said the decision “rewrites the rules,” allowing donors to circumvent existing contribution limits and “enabling a party to serve as an alternative checking account for a campaign.”
“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,” Kagan wrote. “So the court ushers back in the same opportunities for quid pro quo corruption that the contribution limits were meant to check.”
Quid pro quo is a Latin term meaning a favor for a favor.
The three major Republican committees — the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee — ended May with $256 million in cash and no debt. That was more than double the roughly $126 million held by their Democratic counterparts, who also carried more than $18 million in debt.
The court’s ruling may lead party committees to seek the same discounted rates for television and radio advertisements that candidates have long enjoyed, though legal experts said this would raise an untested legal question.
Noel Francisco, a lawyer for the Republican challengers, welcomed Tuesday’s ruling.
“For far too long, campaign-finance laws have severely restricted the ability of political parties to coordinate with their own candidates on campaign ads,” Francisco said.
“The court’s decision today recognizes that regime cannot be squared with the Constitution, and it ensures that parties will be able to work with their candidates going forward in making their shared case to the American voter,” Francisco added.
COORDINATED PARTY EXPENDITURES
Trump’s administration backed the challenge to the limits on the type of political spending at issue, formally called coordinated party expenditures. The challenge was brought in 2022 by two Republican committees, Republican former congressman Steve Chabot of Ohio and Vance, who was running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio at the time.
The conservative-majority Supreme Court in several rulings since 2010 has chipped away at campaign finance laws. These include rulings striking down federal limits on independent political expenditures by corporations and unions and the overall amount an individual can spend on federal political contributions as First Amendment violations.
A 1971 law called the Federal Election Campaign Act regulates fundraising and spending in U.S. elections by limiting the amount that can be spent on a candidate, with the aim of preventing corruption.
Under that law, spending by a political party to advocate for or against a candidate that is not coordinated with a candidate’s campaign is considered an “independent expenditure” — and not subject to a cap.
Spending that is coordinated between a party and a campaign, however, has been restricted.
These spending limits have varied based on the population of the state where the candidate is running for office, lower in states with smaller populations and higher in those with larger populations. In 2025, restrictions ranged from around $127,000 to $3.9 million for Senate candidates and from around $63,000 to $127,000 for House of Representatives candidates.
The Cincinnati-based U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2024 upheld the limits, concluding that they comported with the Constitution.
The Supreme Court had granted a request by the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to intervene to defend the spending limits.
Jacquelyn Lopez and Rachel Jacobs, lawyers with the Elias Law Group that represented the Democratic groups, expressed disappointment with the ruling.
“We strongly disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision, which needlessly overturns its own precedent to destroy a long-standing pillar of federal campaign finance law,” they said in a statement.
Because the Federal Election Commission under Trump declined to defend the provision of federal law challenged by Vance and the other plaintiffs, the Supreme Court appointed lawyer Roman Martinez to do so.
The court rejected an argument by Martinez that the case should be thrown out because Vance has not announced a plan to run again as a political candidate and faces no credible threat of enforcement of the law.
Kavanaugh wrote that Vance’s “Statement of Candidacy” on file with the Federal Election Commission indicating his intent to run for Senate in 2028, as well as his longstanding campaign committee, JD Vance for Senate, “establish that the case is not moot.”
Tuesday’s decision was among several rulings issued this term that benefited Republicans ahead of the November midterm elections.
(Reporting by John Kruzel; Additional reporting by Jason Lange; Editing by Will Dunham)
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