Supreme Court strikes down US campaign spending limits in landmark ruling
The high court strikes down campaign spending limits, citing First Amendment protections in a 6-3 decision On the final day of rulings for the Supreme
The high court strikes down campaign spending limits, citing First Amendment protections in a 6-3 decision On the final day of rulings for the Supreme Court’s current term, the top US court overruled a case that would limit campaign spending by rejecting restrictions on coordinated spending efforts between political parties and their candidates on free speech grounds. The court handed down the ruling on Tuesday in a 6-3 split, with the six conservative judges in the majority, citing free speech grounds, and the three liberal judges dissenting. The Supreme Court ruled that a spending cap on campaign spending, with input from candidates, violates the United States Constitution’s First Amendment after a lower court upheld the limits. The decision, stemming from a Republican-led lawsuit, strikes down a provision of a more than 50-year-old federal election law limiting coordinated party spending. Among the Republican candidates at the centre of the lawsuit is now Vice President JD Vance. Vance was running for the US Senate in Ohio when the lawsuit challenging the restrictions was filed in 2022.
The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 regulates fundraising and spending in US elections by limiting the amount that can be spent on a candidate, aiming to prevent corruption. Under that law, spending by a political party to advocate for or against a candidate that is not coordinated with a candidate’s campaign is considered an “independent expenditure” – and not subject to a cap. Spending that is coordinated between a party and a campaign, however, has been restricted. Tuesday’s decision overruled a 2001 decision in which the Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee challenged the rule against the Federal Election Commission, but the high court had upheld the limits on a vote of 5-4. In 2024, the US 6th Circuit Court of Appeals had also upheld the limits. On appeal, the plaintiffs said that developments in campaign finance over the intervening decades, including shifts in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, had eroded the rationale for that 2001 ruling and urged the justices to overrule it.
Then, when Donald Trump took office, the Federal Election Commission declined to defend the provision of federal law challenged by Vance and the other plaintiffs. The Supreme Court appointed lawyer Roman Martinez to do so. It also granted a request by the Democratic Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to intervene to defend the spending limits. These spending limits have varied by state, being lower in states with smaller populations and higher in those with larger populations. In 2025, restrictions ranged from about $127,000 to $3.9m for Senate candidates and from approximately $63,000 to $127,000 for House of Representatives candidates. The Supreme Court issued its campaign finance ruling with the November midterm elections looming, as President Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans seek to retain control of Congress. The three major Republican committees – the Republican Committee, the Republican Congressional Committee, and the Republican Senatorial Committee — ended May with $256m in cash and no debt. That was more than double the roughly $126m held by their Democratic counterparts, who also carried more than $18m in debt.
The BriefWire