The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down federal limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates, removing a campaign-finance rule that Congress designed to prevent wealthy donors from routing large sums through party committees to help favored campaigns.
The 6-3 ruling, issued June 30 in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, sided with Republican challengers who argued that the limits violated the First Amendment. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion for the court’s six conservative justices. The court’s three liberal justices dissented.
The decision overturns a 2001 Supreme Court precedent that had upheld the same kind of restrictions. It also arrives months before the November midterm elections, when control of Congress will again be decided under campaign rules that have now shifted in favor of parties with large donor networks and well-funded national committees.
At issue were limits under the Federal Election Campaign Act on “coordinated expenditures,” which are campaign activities paid for by a political party in cooperation, consultation, or concert with a candidate. Before the ruling, party committees could still spend unlimited sums independently. But if they coordinated strategy, message, timing, placement, or other campaign activity with a candidate, federal law capped how much they could spend.
Those caps varied by office and state. For 2026, the Federal Election Commission said national party committees could spend between $130,600 and $4,071,800 in coordination with individual Senate nominees, depending on each state’s voting-age population. For House nominees in states with more than one House seat, the limit was $65,300. For House nominees in single-member states, the limit was $130,600.
The court has now erased those coordinated spending limits.
The case was brought by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, JD Vance when he was a Senate candidate in Ohio, and former U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot of Ohio. Vance is now vice president. The challengers argued that political parties have a constitutional right to spend money on advertising and other campaign activities in direct coordination with their own candidates.
Kavanaugh accepted that argument, writing that political parties exist to help elect candidates who will advance their agenda. He said the law burdened core political speech by limiting the ordinary cooperation between parties and nominees.
“In short, constitutional text, history and precedent establish that the political-party coordinated-expenditure limits violate the First Amendment,” Kavanaugh wrote.
The ruling continues a long Supreme Court retreat from federal campaign-finance restrictions. Since Citizens United in 2010, the court’s conservative majority has repeatedly treated spending limits as speech limits and narrowed the government’s authority to restrict money in politics. The new decision targets a different part of the campaign-finance system: the wall between direct candidate coordination and independent outside spending.
That wall mattered because coordinated spending is especially valuable to campaigns. When a party can speak directly with a candidate about what to say, where to advertise, which voters to target, and when to spend, the money can function more like campaign money than outside advocacy. Supporters of the old limits argued that without caps, donors could give large checks to party committees with the expectation that the party would use the money to pay a candidate’s bills.
Justice Elena Kagan made that point in dissent. Joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Kagan wrote that the majority had opened a new route around direct contribution limits. Federal law still limits how much an individual donor can give directly to a candidate. But Kagan warned that donors can now give far larger sums to party committees and expect those committees to spend in coordination with a specific campaign.
The result, she wrote, is that parties can become “an alternative checking account for a campaign.”
The majority rejected that view, saying other safeguards, including earmarking rules and disclosure laws, can address corruption risks. The court also pointed to changes in the political system since 2001, including the rise of super PACs and other outside groups that can already raise and spend unlimited money independently. In the majority’s view, political parties had become weaker in comparison with outside organizations, making the old limits harder to justify.
That reasoning pleased Republican committees and campaign lawyers who had long argued that parties should be able to work more freely with their candidates. Reuters reported that Trump praised the ruling on Truth Social, calling it “A BIG WIN FOR REPUBLICANS and, more importantly, The First Amendment!”
But the decision also gives a practical advantage to the party infrastructure with the most money on hand. Reuters and the Associated Press both reported that Republican committees entered the midterm season with a cash advantage over Democratic committees. The ruling may allow those committees to shift more resources into candidate-aligned advertising, voter outreach, polling, and other campaign services, now without the old coordinated spending caps.
The effect could be especially important in close Senate and House races where television, digital advertising, mail, and field operations are expensive. Political parties can now coordinate fully with campaigns on those efforts, so long as the spending fits within other federal rules that remain in place.
The ruling does not eliminate direct contribution limits to candidates. It also does not remove disclosure requirements or rules barring expressly earmarked donations that are routed through parties to candidates. But campaign-finance watchdogs say those remaining rules may be too narrow to prevent donors from signaling their preferences or making large donations with a shared understanding that the party will spend for a particular campaign.
Campaign Legal Center, the League of Women Voters, and Common Cause filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the justices to uphold the limits. After the ruling, Trevor Potter, president and founder of Campaign Legal Center and a former Republican chairman of the FEC, said the court had weakened an already fragile system of campaign-finance oversight.
The Federal Election Commission’s role also matters. Reuters reported that after Trump returned to office, the FEC declined to defend the challenged law. The Supreme Court allowed Democratic Party committees to intervene in defense of the spending limits, and the court appointed lawyer Roman Martinez to defend the judgment below after the government changed position.
That procedural history added another accountability layer to the case. A law enacted by Congress, previously upheld by the Supreme Court, and affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit was ultimately left without a defense from the federal agency charged with administering campaign-finance law.
For voters, the ruling may make it harder to see where candidate strategy ends and party spending begins. It may also increase the value of large donations to national party committees, especially from donors seeking influence in races where candidates themselves cannot legally accept large direct checks.
The decision leaves Congress with fewer tools to limit the role of big money in elections. It also places more pressure on disclosure rules, anti-earmarking enforcement, and a divided FEC to police coordination abuses after the court removed one of the clearest spending caps.
Kagan’s dissent framed the ruling as a direct threat to anti-corruption law and democratic trust. “So the Court ushers back in the same opportunities for quid pro quo corruption that the contribution limits were meant to check.”
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