Supreme Court Strikes Down 52-Year-Old Cap on Coordinated Party-Candidate Spending
The 6-3 ruling in NRSC v. FEC removes a structural limit on party influence in federal campaigns, raising new questions about the boundary between party treasuries and candidate committees.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Tuesday that Congress may not cap the amount a national political party spends in direct coordination with its own candidates, according to the Court's published opinion in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission. The decision overrules the Court's 2001 holding in FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee (534 U.S. 431) and strikes down a coordinated expenditure limit that has been a feature of the Federal Election Campaign Act since its 1974 enactment.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh authored the majority opinion, joined by five colleagues. The precise dollar figures previously governing coordinated party expenditures were set by FEC regulations that adjusted annually for inflation; for the 2024 Senate cycle, those limits ranged from approximately $59,400 in the smallest states to more than $6.7 million in California, according to FEC published schedules. Those ceilings are now constitutionally unenforceable under the majority's holding.
The ruling applies equally to both the Republican and Democratic national party committees — including the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — all of which are subject to the same FECA coordinated expenditure framework that the Court has now invalidated. No party committee has yet filed updated spending disclosures reflecting the ruling, as it was issued Tuesday; the FEC has not publicly issued guidance on how it will revise its reporting instructions.
The decision does not address independent expenditures, contribution limits from individuals to candidates, or foreign-national contribution prohibitions, each of which remains governed by separate statutory and constitutional frameworks. The dissenting justices, whose identity and reasoning will be reflected in the full published slip opinion available at supremecourt.gov, have not yet been individually attributed in available source material.
Several questions remain unanswered by currently available public records. It is unknown whether the FEC will issue an emergency rulemaking to revise its coordinated expenditure regulations or allow the ruling to take effect without formal regulatory action; an FEC statement or Federal Register notice would resolve that question. It is also unknown what aggregate dollar amounts party committees may now direct to competitive races in the 2026 midterm cycle; those figures will appear in FEC quarterly and monthly disclosure filings, the next of which are due July 15, 2026 for the June 30 reporting period.