In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.
Before it broke for the summer, the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, restored the ability of political parties to do what they are organized to do: find, recruit, and publicly support the candidates that represent the views of their members. Political parties exist to get their candidates elected. Consulting with those candidates before expressing support for their election is not only reasonable behavior, but a right protected by the Constitution.
That is how our political system operated for the first 200 years of this nation’s history — until Congress decided to limit political parties from coordinating their support with their own candidates.
The ruling in NRSC v. FEC corrects this grave constitutional error. In a decision authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the court struck down the federal limits on coordinated party spending contained in the Federal Election Campaign Act, concluding that they violate the First Amendment. By limiting political spending, you are limiting political speech. The case was brought by then-Sen. JD Vance, then-Rep. Steve Chabot, and the National Republican Senatorial and Congressional Committees.
Under FECA, political parties faced strict dollar caps on spending made in cooperation with their candidates — ranging from $65,300 to $130,600 for House races and up to $4 million for Senate races in the 2026 cycle — calculated using a formula based on the population of states. Thus, the amount that could be spent in each state varied widely.
A party could spend unlimited money on ads run independently, but the moment it asked its own nominee, “Does this ad actually represent your views?” that spending became legally restricted. As Kavanaugh observed, the law inflicted a “stifling effect on the ability of the party to do what it exists to do.”
The Supreme Court has long held that the First Amendment protects not only freedom of speech but freedom of association, a principle as old as America itself. Alexis de Tocqueville, marveling at the young republic in the 1830s, wrote that in no country had the principle of association been more successfully applied. As Advancing American Freedom argued in its amicus brief:
“The right to freely speak, and freely associate, strike at the heart of human freedom. These freedoms are not forfeited merely because the speaker is a group associating as a political party. Such a content-based and identity-based rule runs contrary to the basic rights the First Amendment protects, allowing the government to force some people or speech outside of that Amendment’s protective umbrella.”
The political party is perhaps the most quintessentially American association: citizens united around shared beliefs, organized to elect people who represent those beliefs. Yet the coordinated-expenditure limits treated parties as a suspect category of speakers, as though consulting with their own candidates threatened democracy rather than embodied it.
As Kavanaugh rightly noted, those limits have allowed outside groups to “gain an unwarranted and unfair advantage over competitor political parties in the political process.” A party that cannot speak with its own candidate isn’t being protected from corruption — it’s being prevented from accomplishing its purpose.
The court’s decision corrects an error first made in 2001, when a bare 5-4 majority in FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee treated coordinated party spending as the functional equivalent of a direct campaign contribution to the candidate. In that misguided opinion, the court held that such coordinated spending was “virtually indistinguishable” from independent expenditures and that the government had an important interest in preventing actual or apparent corruption. That reasoning, as Kavanaugh observed in this week’s opinion, had become like “a three-legged stool where all three legs have already been knocked out.”
Campaign finance restrictions are constitutional only when they prevent quid pro quo corruption, and no one has ever seriously claimed parties were bribing their own candidates. The government instead relied on a circumvention theory: that donors might funnel money to a candidate by giving to the party, which would then coordinate spending on the donor’s behalf.
The theory didn’t hold up. The FEC’s own expert in this case couldn’t identify a single instance of a donor using a party as a conduit for a bribe. Twenty-eight states have no limits on coordinated party spending in state races, with no resulting corruption. Individual donors have no control over how a party committee spends its money in the first place, which makes the circumvention theory hollow.
The court’s 2014 ruling in McCutcheon v. FEC already rejected this same circumvention logic for aggregate contribution limits on how many candidates a donor could give money to, holding that the First Amendment has its fullest application to the conduct of campaigns for political office. Congress, said the court, cannot restrict spending merely to reduce the amount of money in politics or shift relative influence among speakers. This ruling simply extends that reasoning to its logical conclusion.
The three liberal dissenters, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson, could not identify a constitutional principle that justified the limits. Instead, Kagan’s dissent warned of dire consequences, claiming the majority “rewrites the rules, to allow circumvention of the contribution limits,” and predicting a system “increasingly unable to stop political corruption, and thus to preserve our institutions’ democratic legitimacy.”
This is not a First Amendment argument — it is a policy preference dressed up in apocalyptic language. They are apparently horrified at the idea that political parties would speak with their own candidates, reflecting a lack of commitment to robust protections for freedom of speech in the political realm.
The First Amendment does not have an exception for speech the government finds inconvenient or costly, and the dissenters’ willingness to subordinate political association and speech rights to speculative corruption fears reveals which way they lean when political participation and government power come into conflict.
AFTER LOSING IN COURT, IMMIGRATION RESTRICTIONISTS LOSE THE ROOM
Robust political parties are essential to a stable and functioning democracy. Parties will not only be strengthened by this outcome, they will also be more accountable. Candidates who can freely coordinate with their party become more answerable to its values and to their constituents, rather than to the temporary, fly-by-night political action committees that sprang into the gap caused by the coordination limits.
This decision restores the important role political parties play in the political arena: finding the candidates who best represent the public’s views and keeping the democratic process in full vigor.
Hans Von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow in Advancing American Freedom’s Meese Institute for the Rule of Law and Connor Bolster is an intern at Advancing American Freedom.