The Supreme Court has steadily loosened campaign finance rules in a series of decisions ever since Chief Justice John Roberts was confirmed in 2005. They will look to go further on Tuesday, when the court hears arguments in a case challenging the 50-year-old limits placed on coordinated spending between parties and candidates.

In NRSC v. Federal Election Commission, a Republican campaign committee is challenging limits placed on how much money political parties can spend in direct coordination with candidates. Those limits, which were put in place in the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, were intended as a companion to other rules on how much individuals can contribute to individual campaigns, preventing deep-pocketed contributors from using donations to parties as a work-around to those limits. The current limits on how much a party can spend in coordination with a specific candidate vary, from $63,600 for most House races up to $3.9 million for Senate races in California and even more for presidential candidates.

The case stems from Vice President JD Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign in Ohio. During the primary, Vance’s fundraising lagged behind his GOP opponents and he relied on outside spending from billionaire Peter Thiel to push him over the top. He continued to struggle to raise money in the general election against Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan. (Vance eventually won.) And so, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the chief political committee for GOP Senate candidates, and Vance brought suit to allow the party to spend unlimited sums in direct coordination with their candidate, arguing the coordination limits infringed on core First Amendment rights for political speech.

Lawyers for the NRSC argue that the limits in question block constitutionally protected political speech and do not prevent corruption or its appearance. Since “no one seriously claims that parties are trying to bribe their candidates,” the limits have been defended and upheld in the past as preventing “quid pro quo-by-circumvention,” the NRSC brief states. But this justification was ruled out-of-bounds in the court’s 2014 decision in McCutcheon v. FEC and so the party coordination limits should be struck down, the brief argues.

Indeed, preventing the circumvention of contribution limits is at the heart of the coordinated spending limits. If a political party can raise nearly $1 million from a single donor who wants to spend that on a particular candidate, the party can effectively contribute that $1 million — or more — to the candidate’s campaign by funding, for example, their advertisements as a coordinated expenditure. Since candidates are limited to raising $3,500 per election from a single donor, this would be a major way to circumvent those limits, which are at the heart of campaign finance regulation.

Each lower court that heard the case rejected the NRSC’s arguments, following the Supreme Court’s 2001 precedent in FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee that upheld the limits. There, in a 5-4 decision written by then-Justice David Souter, the court ruled that “a party’s coordinated expenditures, unlike expenditures truly independent, may be restricted to minimize circumvention of contribution limits.” But the Supreme Court took up the case and now could upend campaign finance law yet again.

The court has upheld candidate contribution limits as constitutional since 1976, so it would be logical for them to prevent their circumvention — particularly as it has become easier for parties to raise the kind of large contributions that the candidate limits are meant to protect against. But that hasn’t held the court back in the past.

Since the court last heard a case challenging coordinated party spending limits, its composition has changed dramatically — and so has its campaign finance jurisprudence. In the years since 2001, the court’s conservative bloc has grown from five to six with no real moderates among them. And with the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor in 2006, the court lost its last member with any experience running for office or working on a political campaign.

It has also issued decision after decision gutting federal and state campaign finance laws. The most prominent of these is 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC, a decision that enabled corporations, unions and nonprofits to spend unlimited sums on independent campaign expenditures. But there are more, including the McCutcheon decision that invalidated aggregate contribution limits that put a cap on how much money a single donor could contribute in total in one election cycle.

These campaign finance decisions have largely been based on a repeated misunderstanding of how candidates and parties use money in elections. In each case, the court’s decisions loosening campaign finance restrictions have led to massive unintended — at least according to the court’s writings — consequences, such as an increase in undisclosed campaign money and illegal foreign donations and the circumvention of party contribution limits.

There’s no reason to think that won’t happen here.

“This case needs to be looked at in the context of the court’s now-two-decade run of substituting its own judgment for that of voters and Congress on campaign finance,” said Daniel Weiner, a campaign finance law expert for the Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning nonprofit.

In Citizens United, then-Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, explained his decision by stating that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” That has proved wildly inaccurate as the corruption convictions of North Carolina insurance executive Greg Lindberg and former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder (R) and the 2015 indictment of then-Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) all involved corrupting contributions made through outside groups making independent expenditures. (Menendez was later convicted of accepting bribes and acting as a foreign agent in a separate case in 2024.)

Kennedy also promised that, thanks to the internet and disclosure laws, corporations or others spending unlimited sums on independent expenditures could be held accountable by the public. But Citizens United enabled a radical decrease in the transparency of campaign spending as “dark money” nonprofits, which do not disclose their donors, became significant political spenders. These groups now make up a growing percentage of donors to super PACs. Though super PACs do have to disclose their donors, that does not trickle down to requiring disclosures of the donors to those donors — making the true origin of a large portion of election funding completely opaque.

Similarly, the notion that independent expenditures are truly independent from candidates or parties has proved to be completely inaccurate. The largest-spending outside groups are those directly connected to party leaders or staffed by close aides to the candidates they support. Candidates provide information, like b-roll and directions on what messages to use in advertising for outside groups, on their websites or surreptitiously on social media. And in 2024, the FEC ruled that supposedly independent groups may directly coordinate with parties and candidates on get-out-the-vote operations. Billionaire Elon Musk went on to do exactly this with the Trump campaign and earned a plum spot in the White House for his efforts.

In the McCutcheon case, the court’s decision was largely rooted in naive expectations of how political parties would act once aggregate limits were eliminated. The aggregate contribution limits capped the total amount a donor could give in any one election, among all political parties and candidates. The intent was, like the coordinated spending limits, to prevent corruption and work-arounds of the candidate limits.

A key argument in the case was that, absent the aggregate limits, political parties could create a joint fundraising committee that linked all 50 state parties together with the national party and allowed them to easily shift money donated in one state to support a candidate elsewhere. During oral arguments, Alito called these “wild hypotheticals.”

Then-Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority: “The Government provides no reason to believe that many state parties would willingly participate in a scheme to funnel money to another State’s candidates.”

But that’s exactly what happened. Beginning with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016, every presidential campaign has created a super joint fundraising committee that then redirects contributions made to non-swing-state parties toward state parties in swing states or back to the national party.

While the party coordination limits seem to present less of an opportunity for the court to cause severe unintended consequences with another uninformed decision, there are a couple of things to keep in mind.

First and foremost, coordinated spending is done almost entirely in the form of advertising: The candidate designs an ad and plans when and where to run it, and the party foots the bill. But this could have unintended downstream consequences for television stations, which are required to provide candidates with the lowest unit price for campaign ads in the run-up to an election. Neither parties nor outside groups receive this benefit.

If parties can suddenly subsidize candidate ads, television stations could be put under financial strain as they lose money that they previously received from higher charges on party advertising. This is an argument made by lawyers for the Democratic National Committee, who have entered the case to defend the limits.

“Broadcasters across the country will face significant increases in advertisements that purport to qualify for lowest unit rates, thereby inflicting a substantial financial strain upon them,” the DNC’s brief states.

This is likely to lead broadcasters to challenge rules that interpret coordinated spending as coming from the candidate and therefore receiving the lowest unit rate, according to Marc Elias, the lead lawyer for the DNC.

“This will have commercial impacts outside of the campaign finance world,” Elias said.

And then there are the unintended consequences that may flow within the campaign finance world.

By eliminating the aggregate limits, the McCutcheon decision opened the door for parties to collect massive contributions from single donors through super joint fundraising committees. In 2024, the maximum contribution to Vice President Kamala Harris’ joint fundraising committee was $929,600 for a single donor. Most of that money wound up with the Democratic National Committee or its state parties, which then circumvented contribution limits by routing that money to swing state committees.

If the court does end the coordinated spending limits, it will lead to a mass circumvention of the candidate limits — just as the McCutcheon decision did for party limits. And, as the unintended consequences of McCutcheon now flow into the NRSC case, so too would the circumvention of candidate limits lead toward their ultimate elimination.

There may be reasonable policy reasons to support ending or raising the coordinated spending limits, as the Brennan Center’s Weiner has advocated. In a world where single billionaires like Musk can spend unlimited amounts to directly coordinate with candidates through super PACs, it would be better for political parties, which are rooted in mass democracy and governance, to be on an equal, if not supreme, footing.

But that should be done by Congress, Weiner argues, not the Supreme Court — which time and time again has shown it does not understand how political campaigns work.

“The ultimate question is who should decide,” Weiner said. “I think it should be Congress that decides. We think of that as a fundamental principle. This is not something within the constitutional competence or, frankly, the expertise of the Supreme Court to make this call.”