The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Tuesday that the federal government cannot cap how much a political party spends in direct coordination with its own candidates.National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission struck down a Federal Election Campaign Act provision that had limited coordinated party expenditures since 1974, overruling the court’s 2001 decision in FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority that the limits violate the First Amendment. I think the Court got this one right, and I say that as someone who also believes campaign money has gotten out of hand. Those two positions aren’t in conflict. They answer different questions.For nearly two centuries, parties spent freely supporting their own candidates without anyone treating it as a constitutional crisis. The limits at issue trace back to a Watergate-era statute that treated a party helping its own nominee as the same as an outside group buying influence over a stranger. That was always a strange equivalence. A party isn’t an outside interest trying to capture a candidate. It’s the vehicle the candidate ran under. Telling the Republican National Committee it can’t coordinate support for its own Senate nominee is like telling a publisher how many column inches it can give its own editorial. The First Amendment doesn’t carve out an exception for parties working with their own candidates, and the court was right to stop pretending otherwise.
The court got party spending right. Foreign money is still the problem
The court did its job. It read the text, looked at 200 years of practice, and concluded that parties coordinating with their own candidates is core speech.
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