Just days before the 2022 midterm elections, as Democratic candidates were drastically outspending JD Vance and other Republicans running for the Senate, the future vice president and the Senate G.O.P. campaign arm filed a lawsuit to try to change the rules of the game.<\/p>\n
They knew it was too late to affect that year\u2019s elections. The lawsuit was part of a longer-term gambit to tilt the financial playing field in future elections in the Republican Party\u2019s favor. The goal was to unshackle political parties from existing limits on what they could spend in coordination with the candidates they were supporting.<\/p>\n
The plan paid off on Tuesday, when the Supreme Court rolled back<\/a> decades-old restrictions on political party spending, further expanding the power of big money in American politics.<\/p>\n It couldn\u2019t have come at a better time for Republicans: Their party committees are flush with cash, and they can start spending that money immediately on midterm battlegrounds that will determine control of Congress.<\/p>\n For years, Republican candidates had faced a persistent disadvantage. Their Democratic counterparts had raised far more money, primarily from small-dollar donors online. And candidates qualify for cheaper advertising rates than political parties do.<\/a> Republicans wanted to close that gap by letting parties \u2014 which can be funded by six-figure checks from wealthy donors \u2014 spend as much as they wanted in coordination with candidates. In the process, the parties would also qualify for those lower ad rates.<\/p>\n The lawsuit was the brainchild of Ryan Dollar, then the general counsel of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. The Supreme Court had been loosening campaign spending restrictions for years, and Mr. Dollar spied an opportunity to loosen them some more.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had our eyes on SCOTUS from Day 1,\u201d Mr. Dollar said in an interview.<\/p>\n In a 6-3 decision on Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled limits on coordinated spending violated the constitution\u2019s First Amendment.<\/p>\n \u201cFor nearly 200 years after the ratification of the First Amendment, parties could spend freely to support their candidates during campaigns and could do so in coordination with the candidates,\u201d Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the majority opinion. He cast the decision as returning to that era.<\/p>\n Justice Elena Kagan, one of the court\u2019s liberal justices, wrote a dissent lamenting that while donations to candidates are now limited to $7,000, donations to parties can be \u201cas much as half a million dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe Court ushers back in the same opportunities for quid pro quo corruption that the contribution limits were meant to check,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n The ruling in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission<\/a> is widely expected to usher in the biggest shift in how campaigns are funded since the aftermath of the Citizens United decision in 2010, which lifted limits on corporate expenditures and laid the groundwork for the current era of big-spending super PACs.<\/p>\n The decision is the latest in a series of Supreme Court rulings in recent years that have struck down limits on political spending using the argument that spending money amounts to protected speech. The ruling also suggested the court\u2019s willingness to further dilute such limits in the future.<\/p>\n In the short term, the case is likely to benefit Republicans. The Republican National Committee entered June with $125.5 million in the bank, while the Democratic National Committee carried more debts than cash on hand.<\/p>\n