As candidates and political parties prepare for the 2026 midterm election campaign, the Supreme Court on Tuesday will consider whether long-standing legal limits on coordinated spending, enacted to prevent corruption, violate the First Amendment.
The case was brought by Republican campaign committees for Senate and Congress along with then-Sen. JD Vance and former Rep. Steve Chabot, both Ohio Republicans, against the Federal Election Commission, which is charged with enforcing the rules.
In this Oct. 24, 2016, file photo, the Federal Election Commission’s seal is printed on the window awnings outside its headquarters in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, FILE
The coalition seeks to remove limits on the ability of parties, which often have a fundraising advantage over individual candidates, to more freely and directly fund television advertising and organizing efforts of the candidates they favor. The practice is known as coordinated spending.
Oral arguments will take place before a Supreme Court that has been consistently skeptical of campaign finance regulations on free speech grounds, narrowing the scope of contribution limits and, in 2014, rolling back limits on corporate campaign spending with the Citizens United decision.
An undated photograph shows the United States Supreme Court building in Washington, DC.
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The Trump administration, which controls the FEC, refuses to enforce or defend coordinated spending limits. Instead, the Democratic National Committee and a Supreme Court-appointed attorney will argue why they should be preserved.
“This has been held constitutional at least twice before by the Supreme Court and more times by lower courts,” said Marc Elias, the Democratic attorney defending the law. “The entire campaign finance system is based on these limits.”
In 1974, Congress established limits on the amount of money that American individuals, organizations, and political parties can give directly to candidates, and the Supreme Court has upheld them as permissible protections against bribery in the electoral process.
In 2025, political contribution limits are $3,500 per person for an individual candidate and $44,300 per person for a national party committee per year. according to the FEC.
In this case, what is at stake are additional limits set by Congress on the amount of money a political party can spend in direct coordination with a candidate.
In this Nov. 7, 2022 file photo, people cast early votes at a satellite city clerk office in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images, FILE
The FEC’s coordinated spending limits are calculated based on each state’s voting-age population and the number of members of Congress. For Senate candidates, the limit is between $127,200 and $3.9 million in 2025; for House candidates, the limit is $63,300 in most states, according to the FEC.
Proponents say spending limits prevent quid pro quo corruption between a candidate and a party, and prevent individuals from trying to circumvent contribution rules by essentially funneling donations to a candidate through the party, which is subject to higher caps.
“If those contributions, which eclipse the basic limits of [individual] contributions to candidates, are effectively made available to the candidate through coordinated spending, become potent sources of real or perceived corruption,” attorneys for Public Citizen, a nonprofit voter advocacy group, argue in a brief to the high court.
More than a dozen states and independent election watchdog groups have also urged the court to leave campaign finance rules in the hands of lawmakers, arguing they are better positioned than judges to set election policies.
Limit advocates also maintain that the Republican plaintiffs lack legal standing to bring the case. They say that because the Trump FEC is not going to enforce the rules, there is no harm to the parties involved and that Vance and Chabot are not even active candidates for public offices that would be affected by the coordinated spending limits.
Republicans insist that coordinated spending limits constitute an unconstitutional suppression of free speech and are ineffective in their purported goal of curbing corruption.
“One of the key functions of a political party is to ensure that its candidates vote for the party’s platform once in office,” Republican committees tell the Supreme Court.
The case – National Republican Senatorial Committee, et al. v. Federal Electoral Commission, is expected to be decided at the end of June 2026, when the Supreme Court’s term ends.
