Public Reason | Deep Reason

Money in federal elections has long moved through three separate channels, each with its own rules.

The first channel is a direct gift from a donor to a candidate. Congress caps this tightly: $3,500 per election, or $7,000 if you count a primary and a general election together. This is the "base limit," and it is meant to stop a wealthy donor from simply buying a candidate's loyalty.

The second and third channels both involve a political party's own committee spending its own money. What separates them is not the source of the money. It is a single question: does the party talk to the candidate's campaign about how that money gets spent?

If the answer is no, the spending is "independent." Since the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, a party can spend unlimited money on ads supporting its candidates, as long as its staff make every decision on their own, with no input from the candidate's campaign about which ad airs, where, or when. Say a party wants to spend $10 million on Senate ads: if its own staff pick the ad, the airtime, and the message without consulting the candidate, all $10 million is legal, and has been since 2010. This rule is not unique to parties. Super PACs, unions, corporations, nonprofits, and individuals can all spend unlimited money this way too, as long as they also stay uncoordinated.

If the answer is yes, the spending is "coordinated," and here is the important part: a special, higher-dollar allowance for coordinated spending, with specific dollar figures published every year, has only ever applied to political party committees, under 52 U.S.C. §30116(d). Until June 30, that party-only allowance was capped. If any other group, a super PAC, a union, a corporation, a nonprofit, coordinates spending with a candidate's campaign, federal rules give it no separate allowance at all. Instead, that spending is reclassified as an ordinary in-kind contribution, subject to the same $3,500 base limit as an individual donor. For a super PAC built to spend tens of millions, that is effectively no coordination allowance at all, which is exactly why non-party outside groups stay strictly independent.

So the June 30 ruling is narrower than "parties can now spend without limits" might suggest. It struck down the dollar caps in the party-only allowance and left the separate rule treating non-party coordination as a capped, in-kind contribution untouched. Only party committees gained new spending power.

In practice, this line is why large party committees keep separate teams, sometimes physically separated, for independent and coordinated spending. Staff on the independent side are barred from talking to the campaign at all, so the party can keep that spending unlimited.

On June 30, the Supreme Court struck down the party-only coordinated-spending caps described above. The 6-3 ruling in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC holds that those limits violate the First Amendment.

The numbers involved were not small. Under the formula the FEC used through June 2026, a national party committee could spend between $130,600 and $4,071,800 coordinating with a single Senate candidate, $65,300 to $130,600 with a House candidate, and up to $32,392,200 with a presidential candidate in the last cycle. All of those limits are now gone; a party can spend as much as it wants working directly with the campaigns it supports.

Two things did not change: the $3,500-per-election base limit on direct donor-to-candidate gifts, and the disclosure rules requiring parties to publicly report who gave money and how much. The decision applies right away, to the 2026 midterms already underway, and treats every party the same way; Republican and Democratic committees alike can now coordinate without limit.

The lawsuit started in 2022. The plaintiffs, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, then-Senate candidate J.D. Vance, and then-Rep. Steve Chabot, argued that a party has a First Amendment right to coordinate spending with its own candidates, and that the Court's 2001 ruling upholding the old caps, FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee (Colorado II), no longer fit the Court's more recent rulings.

The Sixth Circuit upheld the caps in 2024, since Colorado II was still binding precedent. But several of its own judges wrote separately to say they doubted Colorado II could survive much longer.

By the time the case reached the Supreme Court, the sides were not neatly divided by party. The federal government, representing the FEC, told the Court it agreed with the Republican plaintiffs, leaving no one to defend the lower court's ruling, so the Court appointed an outside lawyer, Roman Martinez, to argue the other side. The Democratic National Committee and its Senate and House counterparts stepped in to defend the very caps Republican committees wanted thrown out, even though Democratic committees benefit equally now that both are gone.

Two watchdog groups also weighed in. The Campaign Legal Center, representing the League of Women Voters and Common Cause, argued the caps were a needed check on corruption. The Brennan Center for Justice took a narrower position: it did not argue the caps were good policy, and has previously said Congress might want to loosen them, only that this was a decision for lawmakers, not courts, to make.

Before ruling on the First Amendment question, the justices had to decide whether the case was still alive. By 2026, J.D. Vance was Vice President, not a Senate candidate, and the executive branch had already said it would stop enforcing the caps, pointing toward the case being moot: no live dispute left to decide.

The Court found two reasons it survived anyway. Federal law lets private citizens sue over campaign finance violations even when the FEC won't act, so the threat of a lawsuit was still real. And Vance still had an active "Statement of Candidacy" on file for a possible 2028 Senate run, plus an existing campaign committee, enough to keep his personal stake concrete.

Once past that hurdle, the Court applied a test called "closely drawn" scrutiny: a spending limit is allowed only if truly necessary, and precisely tailored, to a real government interest. Everyone agreed the interest was legitimate: stopping donors from using a party as a workaround to give a candidate more than the base limit allows. The majority's key move was deciding two other safeguards already do that job well enough. "Earmarking" rules treat a donor's gift to a party as a gift to the candidate if directed toward that candidate in any way, capping it at the same $3,500 limit. Disclosure rules let the public see exactly where the money goes. With those two tools in place, the majority held, an added spending cap is no longer necessary.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion, joined by five other justices. He framed the ruling as a natural next step after two earlier decisions: 2014's McCutcheon v. FEC, which struck down a different set of contribution limits partly because it found earmarking and disclosure rules were already doing enough anti-corruption work, and 2022's FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate. In the majority's view, Colorado II rested on reasoning the Court had already abandoned in those two later cases.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote the dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. She opens with history rather than case law: the 1974 campaign finance overhaul that followed Watergate, including a well-documented episode in which dairy industry executives pledged $2 million to Richard Nixon's campaign in exchange for a price-support increase for milk. That history, Kagan argues, is exactly why coordinated-spending caps exist: to stop a donor from doing indirectly, through a party, what the law already forbids doing directly. She puts a number on the risk. With the direct base limit at $7,000, she writes, a donor can now route roughly half a million dollars to a party to help cover a favored candidate's bills.

The practical effect lands hardest in the small number of races that will decide control of Congress. Thirty-five Senate seats are up in 2026, and independent trackers including Ballotpedia count roughly nine as genuine battlegrounds, most of them Republican-held seats in states like Maine, Michigan, and Ohio. In each one, the national Republican and Democratic Senate committees can now spend without limit planning ad strategy directly with their nominee's own campaign, not just running ads in parallel without coordinating.

The ruling does not, by itself, favor either party: both committees gained the identical power on the identical day. Which side benefits in practice depends on which raises and deploys more coordinated money in the races that end up close, a question the ruling doesn't answer and this newsletter won't predict. The same expanded ceiling applies to House races and future presidential campaigns, where the coordinated limit for a presidential nominee ($32,392,200 last cycle) is now unlimited too.

The ruling took effect immediately, but the agency that would normally write new regulations to match it cannot act. The FEC has lacked the four commissioners it needs for a quorum since 2025, and has repeatedly told federal courts it cannot act on pending matters. Party committees are now operating directly under the Court's opinion, with no updated FEC rulebook to guide them.

The first real test comes July 15, when the next quarterly FEC filing deadline arrives, the first disclosure window since the ruling and the first chance to see whether party committees have actually started spending differently. This case reached the Court over a procedural fight about whether it was still live, not a full trial record on how parties spend money in practice, so the line between "coordination" and two organizations simply talking to each other remains largely untested. More lawsuits over exactly where that line falls are likely.

The majority and the dissent are not as far apart as the 6-3 vote suggests. Both sides agree that a donor routing money through a party to evade the base limit is a real problem worth preventing. They disagree only about whether the earmarking and disclosure rules left standing are strong enough to prevent it on their own.

That narrower disagreement points to a fix that would not require revisiting the constitutional question: Congress could tighten the earmarking rule's definition, shorten disclosure windows, or require more detailed reporting of who is coordinating with whom. Because the FEC cannot write new regulations on its own, any such fix would have to come from Congress directly, and would likely arrive after the 2026 cycle the new rules are already shaping.

We hold government to the record. Hold us to it too — hit reply with feedback or things we missed.