Supreme Court Strikes Down Campaign Spending Limits

The US Supreme Court has again struck down campaign spending limits, this time rejecting federal restrictions on coordinated spending between political parties and their candidates on free speech grounds.

The ruling on Tuesday comes as major Republican committees head towards the November midterm elections with a significant cash advantage over their Democratic counterparts.

Siding with Vice-President J.D. Vance and other Republican challengers, the court ruled 6-3 that a cap on the amount of money parties can spend on campaigns with input from candidates violates the US Constitution’s First Amendment protections against government abridgment of freedom of speech.

Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote the ruling, said that “constitutional text, history, and precedent establish that the political-party coordinated expenditure limits violate the First Amendment”.

The court’s six conservative justices were in the majority, while its three liberal justices dissented.

The majority overruled a 2001 Supreme Court ruling arising from Colorado that addressed the very same issue, determining that developments in campaign finance over the intervening decades, including shifts in the court’s jurisprudence, have eroded the rationale underlying that prior ruling.