In JD Vance case, US Supreme Court may again chip away campaign finance limits

By Jan Wolfe

WASHINGTON, Dec 4 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that decades of whittling down campaign finance laws suppressed political speech in violation of constitutional protections. A case to be argued next week by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance gives the court and its conservative majority a chance to strengthen that trend.

Vance, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio when the trial begins in 2022, and two GOP caucus members appealed a lower court’s decision that upheld limits set by Congress in the 1970s on how much money political parties could spend in coordination with candidates for federal office.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments Tuesday in the case that could further reshape the U.S. campaign finance system by lifting yet another spending cap at a time when critics argue big-money donors already have too much influence over American elections.

Republican President Donald Trump’s administration supports the vice president’s handling of the case. A decision is expected by the end of June.

If history is any guide, the court with a 6-3 conservative majority will likely rule in favor of Republicans who challenge campaign finance regulation on free speech grounds, according to Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in California.

“For more than two decades, the Supreme Court has oscillated between whittling away and hammering campaign finance laws, finding that many of these laws violate free speech,” Levinson said.

CITIZENS UNITED DECISION

The Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, finding that restrictions imposed by Congress violated free speech rights under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, allowing corporations and other outside groups such as labor unions to engage in unlimited independent spending on election campaigns.

This decision paved the way for the creation of independent political action committees called “Super PACs” and other groups that can receive unlimited donations.

The Court followed up in 2014, again on First Amendment grounds, by lowering limits on the total amount an individual can spend on federal political contributions.

In a 2022 decision siding with Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, the court struck down a federal campaign finance law that limits how and when candidates can repay loans to their own campaigns, again citing the First Amendment.

Republicans often argue that these decisions have been unfairly vilified by liberals. They praise the decisions as encouraging political speech that the Supreme Court has already ruled is worthy of the highest level of First Amendment protection.

The case, between the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Federal Election Commission, discussed Tuesday, involves a section of the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act that forms the basis of the United States’ campaign finance regime.

This law and its amendments, such as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, regulate fundraising and spending in U.S. elections by limiting the amount of money people, groups, and political parties can contribute or spend on a candidate in order to prevent fraud.

COORDINED SPENDING

Under the Federal Election Campaign Act, expenditures by a political party to advocate for or against a candidate but are not coordinated with the candidate’s campaign are considered “independent expenditures” that are not subject to limits on amount.

However, expenditures coordinated between a party and a campaign are limited by law and vary depending on the population of the state in which the candidate is seeking office; It is lower in states with less population, and higher in states with more population. In 2024, the limits ranged from about $123,000 to $3.7 million for Senate candidates and about $62,000 to $123,000 for House candidates, according to court documents.

Congress enacted these limits to ensure that wealthy donors could not exceed limits on how much they could donate to individual candidates.

“If coordinated spending is allowed without limits, parties could become conduits for big donors who want to direct money through parties to their preferred candidates,” said Tara Malloy, an attorney with the Washington-based Campaign Legal Center, an advocacy group that supports strong campaign finance regulations.

The Justice Department, under both Democratic and Republican presidents, has long argued in court for limits on coordinated spending. The Supreme Court found in 2001 that these restrictions were constitutional. ⁠But campaign finance law has changed since then, and Republicans now want a reversal of the 2001 precedent.

In a lawsuit filed in 2022, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, Vance and Republican former congressman Steve Chabot sought a court order blocking the Federal Election Commission from imposing limits on coordinated party spending.

The plaintiffs argue that the restrictions “severely restrict political party committees from doing what the First Amendment gives them the right to do: fully engage with and advocate for their candidates for federal office.”

The Supreme Court’s 2014 campaign finance decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission declared that preventing fraud or corruption in regulating campaign finance is the only legitimate government interest.

Dan ‍Backer, a conservative attorney who played a key role in the First Amendment challenge in the McCutcheon case, said this decision shows why the court should now overturn its 2001 precedent and impose limits on coordinated spending.

“It makes no sense for a political party to corrupt its own candidates,” Backer said. he said. “The party exists to nominate and elect candidates.”

Court-appointed attorney Roman Martinez will do so because Trump’s Justice Department declined to defend the federal law at issue in the Vance case. Martinez argued that the limits on coordinated spending are reasonable, carefully written and consistent with the protection of free speech.

“The use of political parties as conduits to bypass grassroots boundaries and facilitate corruption is not speculative or hypothetical,” Martinez wrote in the court filing. he wrote. “This is a real-world problem, as reflected in evidence from the 1970s to the present.”

Martinez also presented several jurisdictional arguments for why the Supreme Court should dismiss the lawsuit filed by Vance and others without ruling on the legal merits of the case.

Malloy called these arguments a tempting “starting point” for the justices if they are reluctant to take the step of overturning another precedent.

(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham)