U.S. Supreme Court agrees to hear campaign finance case tied to Ohio Republican politicians

By Nick Evans
Ohio Capital Journal

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to take up a campaign finance case initially filed by Ohio Republican politicians, with former U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot and then-U.S. Sen. JD Vance challenging limits on coordinated spending between candidates and their party.

In short, their case contends those limits violate political parties’ First Amendment rights.

The U.S. Supreme Court will consider the case during its upcoming term which begins in October.

Since its initial filing, the chief fundraising committees for GOP candidates in Congress, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and National Republican Congressional Committee, have taken over as the lead plaintiffs.

In a social media post, NRSC chairman U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, R-SC, and NRCC chair U.S. Rep. Richard Hudson, R-NC, welcomed the court’s review.

“The government should not restrict a party committee’s support for its own candidates,” they wrote. “These coordinated expenditure limits violate the First Amendment, and we appreciate the court’s decision to hear the case.”

Digging into the weeds
The petition argues that it makes perfect sense for parties to get a candidate’s input before speaking on their behalf, “and for nearly the first 200 years of our nation’s history, a party was free to do so.”

Campaign finance laws don’t actually prohibit committees like the NRSC and NRCC from spending on behalf of favored candidates. What they do is set a series of ground rules.

Independent expenditures — those made without candidates’ input — have no upper limit. Coordinated spending, however, faces limits tied to the state’s voting age population.

To petitioners, that amounts to “the campaign ‘equivalent of prohibiting communication between a coach and quarterback late in a tied game.’”

That analogy is a little misleading. Communication in game, like current campaign finance law, has its limits. The coach can’t coordinate with the quarterback whenever they want — the signal gets cut when the play clock hits 15 seconds.

In an even more aggressive analogy, petitioners compared an earlier decision maintaining campaign spending limits to “a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority.”

It’s a well-known quote from the dissent in Korematsu, a notorious U.S. Supreme Court case upholding the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Still, the petitioners note court precedent holds the only grounds for limiting political speech is “the prevention of quid pro quo corruption or its appearance.”

The limits at issue, they argue, were established to limit money in politics generally — a “constitutionally insufficient” purpose.

The committees dismiss as “implausible” the idea that donors might seek to influence a candidate by funneling money through the party apparatus. Just look at the rise of Super PACs, they argue.

“While party contributions to candidates have barely budged since 2004,” the petitioners contend, “non-party independent expenditures (including by Super PACs) have shot up by over 114 times in that period.”

The petitioners add a lower court “did not find any instance of quid pro quo corruption linked to coordinated party expenditures.”

Critics chime in
The Campaign Legal Center’s Senior Counsel for Campaign Finance David Kolker actually worked on case the NRSC and NRCC are trying to overturn.

“They’ve survived just fine for the past 50 years living with these limits,” he said. “So, the idea that the sky is falling is relatively absurd.”

Kolker emphasized they face no limit for independent expenditures, and the committees get greater leeway on coordinated expenditures than the average citizen.

He expects the petitioners will argue they’re at a disadvantage compared to other political spenders — a point which he disputes. But more fundamentally, Kolker argued, that perceived disadvantage comes from the court loosening or eliminating earlier campaign finance restrictions.

“The idea that the solution is to loosen even more restrictions rather than putting back the ones that had been in place, is unfortunate,” he said.

Catherine Turcer who heads up Common Cause Ohio, compared the current limits to a speed limit.

A lack of tickets in a 70-mph zone doesn’t mean it’s safe to push the speed limit higher. And after years of chipping away at campaign finance laws, the petitioners’ arguments ring a bit hollow and self-serving, she said.

“I do think there’s this thing of like, well, it’s just the wild, wild west out here,” Turcer said, “and that’s why we don’t want any rules on us.”

Despite their arguments to the contrary, Turcer worries if the Supreme Court sides with the committees, “wealthy donors could simply circumvent the individual contribution limits by just routing everything to the political parties.”

Turcer argued Ohioans have had a front row seat to political corruption cases in recent years, and it’s not hard to imagine “what happens when there is coordination with a candidate with large sums of money.”