Supreme Court grapples with limits on campaign spending by political party committees

Supreme Court justices grappled Tuesday with whether to topple another domino in campaign finance restrictions — this one a limit on political party committees’ ability to coordinate with individual candidates on how to spend money.

Vice President J.D. Vance and Republican congressional campaign committees have asked the justices to strike down the restriction on coordinated spending, arguing that it infringes on free speech rights without providing significant benefits to the political process.

Noel Francisco, the attorney for Mr. Vance and the Republican committees, said the coordinated limits are “at war with this court’s recent First Amendment cases.”

The case is the latest to ask the court to rewrite the complex campaign finance rules Congress established in the Watergate era and then tightened with the McCain-Feingold legislation in the early 2000s.

Mr. Francisco said those laws have defanged political parties and shifted cash and power to polarizing super PACs, which can raise and spend massive amounts of money from the outside. He urged the justices to restore power to the parties as a check.

“Political parties serve a moderating influence,” Mr. Francisco told the high court. “By invalidating the coordinated party expenditure limits, you start to restore the political powers to the relative political power that they’ve ultimately had, which I think is ultimately to the benefit of democracy itself.”

Opponents urged the justices to uphold the current law. They warned of the potential for bribery if parties are allowed to coordinate more closely with specific candidates.

They told the justices that the case is a way stop on Republicans’ broader quest to reverse more campaign finance restrictions.

“This wolf comes as a wolf,” said Roman Martinez, appointed by the court to argue in favor of the current rules. “They’re going to keep litigating to knock down every single one of the restrictions, and that includes the limits on donors to candidates directly.”

The coordinated spending limits are part of a complex set of restrictions that Congress has created to limit the influence of money in politics and the potential for bribery.

The rule states that parties’ joint fundraising committees, which aggregate money from other committees, such as state parties, cannot directly coordinate with a candidate’s campaign on how to spend that money.

Some of the justices suggested that limiting coordination was a way of preventing bribery. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, an Obama appointee, said the rules grew out of the Watergate era, when the milk industry funneled massive amounts of money to the Republican Party in exchange for subsidies from Congress.

More recently, she said, tobacco interests funneled money to Republicans to scuttle anti-smoking bills and trial lawyers contributed to Democrats to stop tort reform.

Justice Sotomayor said the high court’s track record hasn’t been great when it moves to strike down campaign finance laws.

“Our tinkering causes more harm than it does good,” she said.

“I personally never think free speech makes things worse. I think it virtually always makes it better,” Mr. Francisco replied.

The high court has been agreeing with him for the past 15 years.

In Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that restrictions on corporations’ independent expenditures outside party and candidate activities were unconstitutional.

Four years later, in the McCutcheon case, the justices ruled that the aggregate limit on how much a party could collect from any one donor, siphoned through donations to other committees that then give to a central coordinating committee, was unconstitutional.

Mr. Francisco said the principle behind the court’s decisions has been that Congress can impose limits to prevent bribery but can’t act to cut down the “overall amount of money in politics.” That, he said, is what the coordination limit does.

Marc Elias, a Democratic attorney who was at the center of the contract to produce the anti-Trump Steele dossier, argued on behalf of Democratic Party political committees.

He challenged Mr. Francisco’s claim that ditching the coordination limit would strengthen parties. He said they would instead become bankrolls for the candidates, forcing them to abandon their party-building and get-out-the-vote efforts.

“What this will do is create a collective action problem that will drive the parties inevitably to just being bill payers,” he said. “There will be an arms race that right now doesn’t exist.”

Mr. Martinez, meanwhile, said Republicans will return to erase other limits if they win this case.

He pointed out that when the Republicans argued against the aggregate limits in the McCutcheon case, the coordination limit was one of the guardrails the party pointed to as still in place. Now Republicans are pushing to erase that too.

“This is the camel’s nose under the tent,” Mr. Martinez said.

Mr. Francisco said some key checks remain. Bribery remains illegal, as does earmarking a party donation for a single campaign. He said there is no evidence that contributions to a party constitute bribes, and indeed, if a wealthy person or interest wanted to sway someone, they would be better served by cutting a million-dollar check to a candidate’s favorite super PAC.

“If this were a real problem, you’d think that they’d have evidence of it occurring one time in all of American history, yet they don’t,” he said.

Justice Sotomayor saw a real possibility of influence-buying. She mentioned “the most major donor to the current president,” who she said “got a very lucrative job” in the administration. She said it had the “appearance of a quid pro quo.”

Mr. Francisco said he figured she was talking about Elon Musk, who became a special adviser to President Trump for the first half of the year.

“I have a hard time thinking that his salary that he drew from the federal government was an effective quid pro quo bribery, which may be why nobody has even remotely suggested that to be the case,” he replied.

Justice Sotomayor countered that Mr. Musk might have instead benefited from “lucrative government contracts.”

Mr. Martinez argued that the justices shouldn’t even be hearing the case. He said Mr. Vance has played down talk of running in 2028, so he is not a current candidate and can’t challenge the law.

Mr. Francisco said Mr. Vance maintains an active campaign account and was a candidate for vice president last year when the case reached the appeals court.

The case is National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission. A decision is expected by the end of June.