Political Parties Can Now Spend Unlimited Money Alongside Their Candidates — The Supreme Court Just Supercharged the Two-Party Machine

The Supreme Court voted 6–3 on June 30, 2026 to strike down a 1974 post-Watergate federal law limiting how much money political parties can spend in direct coordination with their candidates. The case, National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC, was decided along ideological lines, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing the majority opinion finding that the coordinated expenditure caps violated political parties’ First Amendment rights to “freely” and “fully” advocate for their nominees [1]. The ruling overturns a 25-year-old Supreme Court precedent that had upheld the same limits and marks the latest step in the Roberts court’s decades-long trajectory toward a deregulated campaign finance landscape [1, 2]. Under the new framework, party committees — including the Republican National Committee, the Democratic National Committee, the NRSC, the NRCC, the DSCC, and the DCCC — can spend without ceiling in direct coordination with their candidates, potentially redirecting billions of dollars that have flowed to outside super PACs since the 2010 Citizens United decision back into the formal party structures themselves [2, 3].

Why It Sucks:

Campaign Finance Reformers

• The last meaningful wall between donors and candidates just fell. Unlike super PACs, which at least nominally must operate independently of a candidate’s campaign, coordinated party spending runs directly alongside the candidate’s own messaging — meaning a donor writing a $50 million check to a party committee is now functionally writing it straight into a specific Senate race with the candidate’s knowledge and input [1, 2].
• This reconstitutes the Watergate-era corruption model at massive scale. Campaign finance scholars note that the 1974 limits were enacted precisely to break the pre-Watergate pattern of large donors giving to parties in exchange for policy access and government appointments; removing the caps rebuilds exactly that transactional structure at a dollar scale the 1970s reformers could not have imagined [1, 3].
• Accountability is now even harder for the public to trace. Super PACs at minimum require public disclosure filings that watchdog groups can parse; coordinated party spending flows through layered national, congressional, and state committee structures that have historically been more opaque and difficult to track in real time before an election [2, 3].

Republicans and Free Speech Advocates

• Parties are more accountable than shadow super PACs. The strongest argument for this ruling is that it may actually reduce the influence of unaccountable dark-money networks — which face no coordination limits and minimal public disclosure requirements — by making formal party structures a more attractive vehicle for large political spending, bringing money closer to daylight [1, 3].
• The old limits had a structural political bias baked in. The coordination caps disproportionately disadvantaged the formal party apparatus relative to wealthy independent donors and issue-advocacy organizations, which faced no parallel ceiling on their independent political activities — an imbalance the First Amendment rationale was always strained to justify [1, 2].
• Political speech is the core of what the First Amendment protects. The majority, building on Citizens United and a string of prior precedents, holds that the government has no compelling interest in restricting how much a political party — the most explicitly political of organizations — can spend to elect its own nominees [1].

Third-Party and Independent Candidates

• The two-party structural advantage just got dramatically larger. The ruling specifically empowers the national Republican and Democratic party committees with a new unlimited spending channel that is unavailable to Libertarian, Green, and independent candidates — widening a gap that was already prohibitive for any contender outside the two-party duopoly [1, 2].
• Party machines can now discipline internal dissent far more aggressively. With unlimited coordinated spending available, national party committees can lavish resources on preferred primary candidates and starve insurgent challengers, giving party leadership even stronger leverage over any member who steps out of line — making the parties more powerful relative to their own voters [3].
• Voters get fewer genuine choices, not more. A campaign finance system structured around unlimited spending by the two major parties institutionally favors the most entrenched candidates — the opposite of the competitive electoral marketplace that the First Amendment rationale for unlimited political spending is theoretically supposed to produce [1, 2].

Sources & Citations:

[1] NPR: Supreme Court strikes down limits on political party spending
[2] NBC News: Supreme Court strikes down long-standing campaign finance restrictions
[3] Axios: Supreme Court strikes down party spending limits