Is the U.S. Supreme Court Preparing To Undermine Campaign Finance Reforms Again?

In a recent poll of 1,000 Americans, 75 percent indicated they felt that “Allowing people and organizations to spend unlimited amounts of money in our elections makes our democracy weaker, because it gives wealthy special interests too much influence over the decisions our politicians make.” In National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission (NRSC v. FEC), the U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to allow even special interests to effectively bypass campaign contribution limits by permitting unlimited coordination between parties and candidates. Since political parties can accept far more special interest money than candidates, money could flow through them to candidates through coordination with individual campaigns; such coordinated spending was previously capped. This newly legal pass-through, which would upend decades of campaign finance laws, could exponentially increase the appearance of corruption in American electoral politics and make elected officials even more beholden to the special interests that fund their campaigns.

NRSC v. FEC was originally brought by then-Sen. and now Vice President JD Vance and asks the Supreme Court to overturn its 2001 precedent—FEC v. Colorado Federal Campaign Committee—that sets limits on coordinating campaign expenditures between national parties and candidates. The Supreme Court then held that limiting coordinated expenditures between national committees and candidates satisfied a “sufficiently important” government interest in “combating political corruption” and so did not violate the First Amendment. In practice, the coordinated campaign expenditure limit helps to prevent special interests from doing an end run around campaign contribution limits, which could result in the appearance of or actual political corruption by making candidates beholden to contributors. Campaign contribution limits currently stand at $3,500 to candidates per election, $44,300 to national party committees per year, and $62,000 from committees to Senate candidate per election.

The NRSC is now arguing that Colorado should be overturned because the Supreme Court has tightened First Amendment restrictions since that ruling—in McCutcheon v. FEC and in FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate—and has opened the door to unlimited corporate independent expenditures in Citizens United v. FEC. Simply by taking up this case, the court seems willing to overturn Colorado and continue its decade-long trend of striking down congressionally enacted campaign finance reforms and allowing the appearance of corruption to seep into federal elections.

In Citizens United, a 5-4 decision, the right-wing justices held that Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) limitations on corporate independent expenditures—those not directly linked to an individual candidate but advocating the election or defeat of candidates—violated the First Amendment. In the years since Citizens United, so-called independent expenditures have exploded from $500 million in the 2008 election cycle to $4.5 billion in the 2024 cycle. Citizens United also opened the floodgates to “dark money,” the unlimited amounts that special interests can give to 501(c)(4) organizations that are not required to disclose their funders. In 2024, more than $1.3 billion in independent campaign expenditures came from dark money sources, making American elections less transparent, more expensive, and more susceptible to corrupting influences.

In McCutcheon, also a 5-4 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts held for the plurality that the 2002 BCRA establishment of aggregate limits for individuals to donate funds to campaigns violated the First Amendment because it did not meet the objective of preventing corruption. As a result, wealthy individuals and special interests were limited only in the amount of money they could afford to give to individual candidates and party committees. In Cruz, a 6-3 decision written by Roberts, the court struck down BCRA limits that prevented candidates from recouping from post-election campaign contributions more than $250,000 in loans that they personally made to their own campaign. The right-wing majority effectively held that individual donors paying back candidates for their personal expenditures—after the election has taken place—somehow did not raise the appearance of corruption, despite the fact that the statutes were intended to prevent quid pro quo corruption of candidates.

This court has already held that large swaths of bipartisan legislation attempting to limit the corrupting influence of money—especially dark money—in American politics is unconstitutional. In NRSC, the Roberts court will likely take the opportunity to further strike down congressional efforts to set campaign finance limitations, which will only further open the door to the corrupting influence of special interests. An opinion supporting the NRSC’s assertion that campaign coordination limits violate the First Amendment would allow special interests to donate significantly more money to party committees than to individual candidates and potentially allow them to earmark their money to go directly to specific candidates, obviating decades-old contribution limits.

If this turns out to be the case, there is likely little campaign finance legislation that Congress could pass that this Supreme Court would uphold as constitutional. With such a ruling, the majority on the Roberts court would continue to be intentionally ignoring what is clear to the vast majority of Americans: that allowing special interests to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections has a corrupting influence, or at the bare minimum raises the broad perception of that corruption. Rather, it will be on the states to enact limitations on the involvement of special interests, especially corporations, in elections.

Since corporations are legal constructs, not natural persons, states have the authority to define them and what they have the power to do, including whether they have the power to spend in politics. Already, Montana is attempting to address some of the worst offenses by the Roberts court, especially Citizens United, by disempowering corporations from spending on federal, state, and local politics within the Big Sky state. If other states follow suit, that will go a long way toward reining in the unlimited influence that special interests have in politics and that Americans so strongly oppose.

Absent that, it is up to Congress to place limits on an out-of-control Supreme Court through substantive and procedural reforms. It is long past time for Congress to enact 18-year term limits on Supreme Court appointments and place binding ethical regulation on justices, as well as to explore a range of other reforms to address an unelected court more interested in wielding power and imposing its ideology than in applying reason and respecting the rule of law. Otherwise, the Roberts court will continue apace in placing corporate interests over those of the American public, to the detriment of democracy and the nation’s well-being.