This post is co-written with Bob Bauer, NYU Professor of Practice who formerly represented in private practice national and state Democratic Party committees:
Later this week, the Supreme Court will consider hearing a case next Term on whether the First Amendment prohibits Congress from limiting how much political parties can spend for their candidates through TV advertising and other public communications. By law, the parties are limited in this spending when it is coordinated with their candidates—when the candidates are involved in such decisions as content, timing, or budget. In 2024, for example, that meant that the Democratic or Republican party could spend only the trivial amount of $61,800 in coordination with their House candidates.
The case is wider in significance than the opposing positions of the parties and a conclusion in which one will “win” and the other will “lose.” It exemplifies the extensive shift in the role of money in American politics as changes in both the Supreme Court’s constitutional jurisprudence and the way campaigns are financed have moved far from the Watergate era when these limits were enacted.
In a 2001 case, the Court held that the parties are free of the limits only if they make the spending decisions on public communications entirely on their own, independently. As a result, candidates and their parties are constrained in coordinating freely on messaging. The Republican Party is now pushing, and not for the first time, for the Court to reconsider and overrule the 2001decision; the Democratic Party is also again defending them. The parties’ positions are largely tactical: each party is calculating which set of rules best advantages it. The Biden Administration stood behind the law, but the Trump administration has reversed course.
The question now returns to the Court in circumstances very different from those decades ago years ago, when the Court originally upheld these party spending restrictions. For one thing, unlike most campaign-finance cases, this is one where even many in the political reform community support an end to the limits. The Brennan Center, for example, long a leading proponent of campaign finance regulation, has come to this view. Many political scientists agree. Even the court of appeals in the decision now on appeal upheld these limits with apparent reluctance, acknowledging that Supreme Court precedent tied its hands but making clear that there was a “fair” case that the decades of change in campaign finance law and practice cast constitutional doubt on this party spending restriction.
One of the better known reasons for the growing doubt includes a belief that laws elevating the role of powerful outside groups, such as Super PACs, relative to the role of political parties, significantly damage American democracy and governance. Campaign-finance laws that leave Super PACs in a largely deregulated zone have weakened the power of the more regulated political parties in competition with these outside forces. Those with extraordinary wealth who operate though these PACs have dug deep roots into the political system.
The Court will decide to hear this case with a telling example of this development: Elon Musk. Musk’s Canvassers for the America PAC spent over $100 million to effectively run for the Trump campaign its core grass-roots voter canvassing programs. Musk is plausibly insisting that his money played a pivotal role in electing Trump to a second term and helping the Senate Republicans to a solid majority, and his threats to spend against Republicans who cross him, as in supporting the “big, beautiful bill,” scrambles any prediction of their party’s prospects in 2026 and 2028. Meanwhile, President Trump has effectively acknowledged Musk’s potential impact by threatening him with “serious consequences” if he spends money in the mid-terms to support Democrats.
The influence that this new activism achieves from the massively wealthy far surpasses what passed for the “large” contributions that the 1970s reforms were established to limit. And the Federal Election Commission has ruled that a free-spending program like Musk’s is permitted under the same law that imposes limits on what the parties may spend in the same elections.
The case now before the Court therefore engages with a fundamental question of what makes for strong parties in these transformed circumstances. Nearly all political scientists believe that strong parties able to work together with their candidates are critical for a healthy democratic process and for effective governance. When parties are strong, party leaders can more effectively pressure resistant members to support the parties’ legislative agenda. If legislation requires herding individual members, who lack a strong sense of being part of a larger team, legislating becomes extremely difficult. So does the ability to generate political compromises and to construct electorally effective coalitions of diverse interests. And stronger parties promote democratic accountability by presenting voters with clear choices.
Moreover, as one of us has shown in empirical work, when outside groups have more influence, the legislative process becomes more dysfunctional. Legislators are more responsive to the narrower, ideological interests of these groups, rather than to the broader set of interests a political party committed to winning durable electoral majorities strives to represent. Campaigns can also become more incoherent and dysfunctional when campaign-finance laws encourage money to flow to SuperPacs, rather than the parties, setting up conflicts between campaigns and the Super PACs that support them. In addition, for those who believe large donors call the tune in politics, any benefits from these party limits in limiting “undue” influence are elusive in a world of the SuperPacs.
In this era, another consequence of weakened institutional parties has become painfully evident. They can also be more easily become personalistic organizations, in which loyalty to a particular individual’s preferences become more important than support for a policy agenda for which a party stands over many years. A personalist party is a short step toward a personalist presidency, which, as we are seeing, raises a host of its own set of issues in American democracy.
Some critics of the Roberts Court might fear that the case would become another phase in its deregulatory approach to campaign finance. That might well be, but it would not be the whole story. With the changes in our politics, a new challenge to these limits on parties was inevitable. If the Court takes up the case, it would—and should—prompt a much-needed discussion of what democracy requires today to strengthen our parties in the new world of SuperPacs funded by some of the country’s wealthiest individuals.