The Supreme Court Is Poised to Wreck Campaign-Finance Laws Again

Since Colorado II, the Supreme Court has significantly loosened restrictions on money in politics. The court’s conservative majority struck down limits on independent expenditures by corporations and unions during an election campaign in the landmark 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC. That ruling helped fuel the rise of super PACs, which can make unlimited expenditures so long as they do not coordinate with candidates in their decisions. (For a host of reasons, the restrictions on coordination are but a legal fig leaf.) Four years later, in the 2014 case McCutcheon v. FEC, the conservatives also struck down aggregate contribution limits for wealthy donors.

Now the Republicans say it is time for the coordination limits with parties to fall. The GOP’s congressional fundraising arms, the NRSC and NRCC, sued the FEC along with then-Representative Steve Chabot and then-Senator J.D. Vance to overturn the limits on coordinated party expenditures. The lower courts, including the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, sided with the FEC because they said they were bound by Colorado II.

In its brief for the justices, the NRSC argued that the court’s 2001 opinion did not apply to this case because of substantial changes to the law since then. “While Colorado II rejected a facial challenge to an earlier version of the limits, Congress amended that law in 2014 to allow unlimited coordinated spending in certain areas, such as a candidate’s legal fees,” it correctly claimed. As a result, it argued that the justices could side with them without unsettling precedent.