Supreme Court Weighs Whether Coordinated Party Spending Limits Survive After McCutcheon and Citizens United

At oral argument on December 9, 2025, in NRSC v. FEC, No. 24-621, the justices pressed counsel on whether eliminating the coordinated expenditure limits would open a conduit for donors to funnel bribes to candidates through party committees, and whether the Court's own prior decisions — particularly McCutcheon and Colorado II — point in opposite directions.

Noel J. Francisco argued for the petitioners that the limits rest on a theory that an individual donor could launder a $44,000 donation through the party to a particular candidate in exchange for official action. He contended that theory fails for the same reasons the Court rejected it in McCutcheon: the donor must cede control of funds to the party, other safeguards including the earmarking rule, disclosure requirements, and bribery laws already address the concern, and no one has identified a single case in which a donor has actually laundered a bribe to a candidate through a party's coordinated spending even though 28 states allow it. Principal Deputy Solicitor General Sarah M. Harris argued on behalf of the government in support of the petitioners, telling the Court that intervening developments have demolished Colorado II's contrary holding and that the limits unconstitutionally restrict core election speech.

Court-appointed amicus Roman Martinez, defending the judgment below, countered that McCutcheon expressly relied on the coordinated party expenditure limits as part of the basis for its holding, and that petitioners are executing what he described as a bait-and-switch: they persuaded the Court in McCutcheon to strike aggregate limits by pointing to coordinated expenditure limits as a safeguard, and are now asking the Court to eliminate those limits too. He also argued that Vice President Vance's claim is moot because Vance has repeatedly denied having any concrete plan to run for office in 2028, pointing to comments reported the morning of argument in which Vance described a 2028 run as something that could happen and something that might not happen.

Intervenor Marc E. Elias argued that the limits are best understood as caps on in-kind contributions to candidates, not restrictions on party speech, and that removing them would not strengthen parties but would instead create a collective action problem driving parties to become bill-payers for campaigns rather than investing in long-term party-building. He pointed to a 2020 North Carolina prosecution in which an insurance company made a $500,000 contribution to the state Republican Party and then instructed the party to give $250,000 of it directly to a candidate, which was prosecuted as quid pro quo bribery.

Justice Kagan pressed Francisco on whether McCutcheon actually supports his position, noting that the McCutcheon Court specifically pointed to the coordinated expenditure limits as part of the status quo that would prevent circumvention of base contribution limits. Justice Sotomayor cited historical examples including the dairy industry channeling millions of dollars to President Nixon through the Republican Party and its committees, with the industry receiving a hundred-million-dollar subsidy in return, and questioned how petitioners could claim there is no evidence of the problem the limits address. Justice Kavanaugh expressed concern that the overall architecture of campaign finance law has weakened political parties relative to outside groups, while also questioning whether the earmarking rules are effective enough in practice to substitute for the coordinated spending limits. Justice Jackson pressed Francisco to acknowledge that his clients could not commit to leaving other campaign finance limits in place, noting that in McCutcheon they had pointed to coordinated expenditure limits as a reason the Court need not worry about striking aggregate limits.

Francisco closed by arguing that the base contribution limits — uniform at $3,500 for individuals and $500 for party committees regardless of state or race — demonstrate that Congress views the bribery risk as the same everywhere, while the coordinated spending limits range from $60,000 to $4 million depending on race and location, a disparity that makes no sense if the goal is preventing bribery but makes sense if the goal is limiting overall spending in politics, which the Court has repeatedly held is impermissible under the First Amendment.