Supreme Court sides with GOP in campaign finance case led by JD Vance

The Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority ruled for Republicans in their campaign finance challenge to restrictions on political parties spending on ads with input from the party’s candidate.

This Video Is Trending Right Now →

In the latest instance of the court overturning a precedent, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court that the Federal Election Campaign Act’s political party-coordinated expenditure limits violate the First Amendment.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the dissenters that “nothing in the First Amendment mandates that outcome — as indeed this Court has held before.”

The challenge was brought in 2022 by the national Republican senatorial and congressional committees, JD Vance (then a Senate candidate) and then-Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio. They argued that the Federal Election Campaign Act’s expenditure limits violate the First Amendment. They appealed to the high court after the Cincinnati-based appeals court rejected them in 2024. 

The appeals court noted that the Supreme Court had upheld those limits in a 2001 case from Colorado, and that even though the justices had been cutting back on campaign finance restrictions in other cases since then, the Colorado precedent was still on the books. 

When they appealed to the high court, the Republicans called that 2001 Colorado precedent a “5-4 aberration” that “was plainly wrong the day it was decided,” adding that “developments both in the law and on the ground in the 23 years since have only further eroded its foundations.” 

The only justice on the court today from that 5-4 ruling in 2001 is Clarence Thomas, who wrote then that he was “baffled that this Court has extended the most generous First Amendment safeguards to filing lawsuits, wearing profane jackets, and exhibiting drive-in movies with nudity, but has offered only tepid protection to the core speech and associational rights that our Founders sought to defend.”

Citing Thomas on Tuesday, Kavanaugh wrote that to the extent the precedent “has retained any vitality, it is now overruled.”

Instead of defending the law, as the government did previously, the Trump administration said it now agreed that the law “abridges the freedom of speech under this Court’s recent First Amendment and campaign-finance precedents.”