The Supreme Court will soon decide whether the Federal Election Commission‘s coordinated expenditure limits between political parties and candidates are constitutional, possibly opening the floodgates for more coordinated spending in next year’s midterm elections.
In National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, the justices will hear arguments on Tuesday over a challenge brought by the Republican Party’s Senate campaign arm regarding limits between parties and candidates. The high court has largely pared back other campaign finance limits in similar cases, most recently in 2022, when it struck down restrictions around candidates’ loans to their own campaigns in FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate.
The NRSC argued that the coordinated expenditure limit between candidates and parties violates the First Amendment, infringing on the free speech rights of political parties.
“Since their inception, these ‘coordinated party expenditure limits’ have been a form of speech rationing in search of a rationale. Given that they were enacted to ‘reduce’ what incumbents saw ‘as wasteful and excessive campaign spending’ by political parties, the government has spent decades casting about for a way to recharacterize them as an anticorruption measure,” the NRSC brief said.
“But because no one seriously claims that parties are trying to bribe their candidates, the government has been forced to rely on a quid pro quo-by-circumvention defense — namely, that the limits will somehow prevent donors from laundering bribes to candidates through the political parties. This Court, however, squarely rejected the identical theory,” the brief continued.
Carrie Severino, president of the conservative advocacy group Judicial Crisis Network, told the Washington Examiner she believes this case will follow the high court’s pattern of recent campaign finance rulings. She highlighted similarities with the way some of the high court’s recent decisions have almost entirely overruled Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which limited presidents’ ability to fire independent agency heads, which the high court looks poised to fully overrule with Trump v. Slaughter.
“It’s been just like with Humphrey’s Executor, you’ve had this progression of case law where now when you look at it, this case doesn’t fit at all. It’s a case of ‘which one of these is not like the other?’ There’s no way we can keep building on precedent that has been so undermined,” Severino said. “And I think that’s what’s going to happen in NRSC as well, because that’s the only way the court can remain consistent with its very strong First Amendment record.”
For the NRSC case, the Trump administration has declined to defend the limits, with Solicitor General D. John Sauer telling the high court in its brief that it should strike down the rule, which “manifestly flunks” basic legal tests.
“A political party has a special relationship with its candidates, who bear its imprimatur, advocate its platform, and implement its policies once elected. Because parties’ election-time speech advances core First Amendment interests in promoting candidates and policies, the First Amendment makes it difficult for restrictions on party speech to pass muster,” Sauer wrote.
The Democratic National Committee intervened in the lawsuit to defend the FEC’s limit rule, warning that if the high court does not uphold the rule, it could “fundamentally reshape the campaign finance regime.”
“The potential for actual or apparent corruption is obvious. And if this gambit becomes legal, parties will face extraordinary competitive pressure to assume an ever-growing share of candidates’ expenses, starving parties of the resources needed for long-term, party-building activities,” the DNC said in its brief.
Because the FEC declined to defend its coordinated expenditure rule to the Supreme Court, the high court appointed an amicus curiae to the lower court’s ruling to uphold the rule. Lawyer Roman Martinez, who was appointed to defend the lower court’s judgment, argued in his brief that the case is moot because the FEC under the Trump administration has said it would not enforce the rule.
“The Executive Branch — including the Federal Election Commission (FEC) — agrees with petitioners that Section 30116(d) is unconstitutional. There is no longer the actual and imminent threat of enforcement that Article III requires,” Martinez said in his brief to the high court. “Indeed, President Trump has squarely prohibited agencies from acting contrary to his legal determinations.”
“The prospect that a future FEC might change position on Section 30116(d) is too speculative and remote to warrant this Court’s intervention now,” the brief continued.
The NRSC rejected this claim in a reply brief, arguing that the threat of future enforcement remains and therefore makes the “controversy very much alive.” The matter of mootness is likely to be brought up during Tuesday’s arguments, possibly shifting the focus of the justices’ questions.
Severino said she believes Martinez has focused on the mootness argument because it would be difficult to defend the limits to the current Supreme Court, which has rolled back similar campaign finance restrictions on First Amendment grounds.
“That might be a strategy, because he realizes the fact the federal government is not defending the law already signals that this is not a great argument. He could think arguing mootness is easier than trying to say the coordination restrictions comport with the First Amendment, particularly under modern precedent,” Severino said.
Severino also noted it is “interesting” that the federal government is not the one saying the case is moot, arguing that typically a government would argue mootness when it wants to avoid a negative ruling, but instead the Trump-led FEC wants the limits struck down for the future.
“This isn’t the kind of case where the government’s stopped enforcing a law because they are hoping to avoid a court overturning it. The federal government actually wants the case to go to completion because they think the coordination limits really are unconstitutional, and they don’t want to be held to applying that law or to have future governments held to it,” Severino said.
“It’s a bit of a different wrinkle from the way we often see these type of mootness arguments, which is that a government stops enforcing a law when it wants to dodge accountability,” Severino added.
If the high court ultimately rules in favor of the NRSC and wipes away the coordinated expenditure limits between candidates and parties, it could have an impact on spending ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, which are already expected to feature expensive and high-profile races.
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After the Supreme Court hears arguments in NRSC v. FEC on Tuesday, it will issue a ruling in the case in the coming months. A ruling in every case heard by the high court this term, including in NRSC, is expected to be released by the end of June 2026, roughly four months before the midterm elections.
The Supreme Court will hear another case that could shake up the 2026 midterm elections later this term, when it considers the legality of late-arriving mail ballot laws in Watson v. RNC.
