June 30, 2026 01:10 PM UTC

To the Victor Goes the Unlimited Campaign Contributions

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• by: Colorado Pols

We already wrote about another mixed bag of opinions from the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS), but one particular ruling deserves more attention in this space because of the impact it will have on the rest of the 2026 election (and beyond).

As The New York Times explains, SCOTUS today handed the Republican Party one hell of a gift:

Just days before the 2022 midterm elections, as Democratic candidates were drastically outspending JD Vance and other Republicans running for the Senate, the future vice president and the Senate G.O.P. campaign arm filed a lawsuit to try to change the rules of the game.

They knew it was too late to affect that year’s elections. The lawsuit was part of a longer-term gambit to tilt the financial playing field in future elections in the Republican Party’s favor. The goal was to unshackle political parties from existing limits on what they could spend in coordination with the candidates they were supporting.

The plan paid off on Tuesday, when the Supreme Court rolled back decades-old restrictions on political party spending, further expanding the power of big money in American politics.

It couldn’t have come at a better time for Republicans: Their party committees are flush with cash, and they can start spending that money immediately on midterm battlegrounds that will determine control of Congress.

Democratic candidates have long been better than Republicans at raising large amounts of money through small-dollar contributions, which carries extra benefits that Republican candidates can’t overcome merely by relying on PAC money to close the gap. Candidates pay the lowest available rate for television ads, whereas PACs must spend significantly more money for the same 30-second spot. A candidate with a $1 million advertising budget gets much more bang for their buck than a supportive PAC with the same $1 million budget.

But in a 6-3 ruling on Tuesday, the conservative majority of SCOTUS hid behind the First Amendment and changed the game by removing limits on coordinated campaign spending:

The ruling in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission is widely expected to usher in the biggest shift in how campaigns are funded since the aftermath of the Citizens United decision in 2010, which lifted limits on corporate expenditures and laid the groundwork for the current era of big-spending super PACs.

The decision is the latest in a series of Supreme Court rulings in recent years that have struck down limits on political spending using the argument that spending money amounts to protected speech. The ruling also suggested the court’s willingness to further dilute such limits in the future.

In the short term, the case is likely to benefit Republicans. The Republican National Committee entered June with $125.5 million in the bank, while the Democratic National Committee carried more debts than cash on hand.

Republicans will now be allowed to use gazillionaire donations to prop up crappy candidates; crucially, political parties will probably also be able to access the lower advertising rates previously only afforded to candidates themselves.

This is yet another sobering example of how playing by the rules has cost Democrats dearly. Senate Republicans paved the way for this ruling when they refused to consider President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016 — on the absurd grounds that the Senate shouldn’t discuss a new SCOTUS nominee in an election year — and then ignored their own fake rule in 2020 to rush through the Trump appointment of Amy Coney Barrett before Joe Biden became President.

In the meantime, President Trump’s private law firm the Justice Department has finally decided to pay attention to alleged campaign finance violations…so long as those allegations are against a Democrat. As The New York Times reports in a separate story, Arizona Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallegos is under DOJ investigation for alleged campaign finance violations despite the fact that he had already been cleared by the Senate Ethics Committee.

Remember, kids: elections matter. If you fail to heed that lesson, Republicans will do whatever they can to make sure that elections don’t matter anymore.

And as much as Colorado Democrats may be focused on today’s Primary Election, this is also a reminder that the real problem is the people in the other tent.