On Tuesday, the Supreme Court struck down yet another federal campaign finance law, continuing its nearly two-decade drive to destroy anticorruption guardrails. Since its infamous 2010 Citizens United decision, the conservative majority has reinforced the unprecedented fusion of private wealth and political power that now shapes our government.
But the Court is not the only branch of government at fault. For decades, Congress has ceded its authority to presidents and the judiciary and failed to pass long-overdue reforms to repair our warped campaign finance system. Amid growing public outrage at corruption, this ruling must be a wake-up call for lawmakers. Congress must pass a robust anticorruption agenda that would help end the era of massive money in politics that the Court ushered in.
The Court’s 6–3 ruling in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission struck down limits on how much money political parties can spend in coordination with candidates. The caps were enacted in 1974 as part of a series of post-Watergate reforms to prevent politicians from creating the sort of political “slush funds” that President Richard Nixon’s cronies used to fund the Watergate break-in. Most importantly, that package imposed direct limits on how much any one donor could give to a federal candidate. To keep donors from covertly bypassing those limits, Congress restricted how much candidates and parties could spend on coordinated electoral advocacy, which has long been treated as tantamount to funneling cash.
According to the Supreme Court majority’s opinion, those party coordination caps unnecessarily and unconstitutionally restrict free speech because direct contribution limits and other rules, such as disclosure requirements, are enough to prevent corruption. Never mind that the Court rejected this exact argument 25 years ago when it upheld the constitutionality of these very same limits, as Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent pointed out.
This week’s decision is just the latest in a series of cases chipping away at common sense campaign finance rules. Citizens United and other Supreme Court rulings over the last 16 years have already tilted the scales in favor of big donors over voters.
Citizens United gave corporations and other outside groups free license to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections. This decision gave rise to super PACs, groups that are theoretically separate from candidates but can raise and spend unlimited money to elect them. Thanks to weak rules, the separation between candidates and super PACs is mostly illusory. In practice, they often work hand-in-glove. President Trump has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for his super PACs, with money pouring in from favored industries like fossil fuels and cryptocurrency, major government contractors, and in one instance, a donor whose son touted her million-dollar donation in his successful application for a presidential pardon.
As it has in previous deregulatory rulings, the Court in NRSC once again stressed the role of donor transparency in keeping big money in line. The majority declared that coordinated expenditure limits were unnecessary if voters could scrutinize donors’ identities and judge for themselves whether a candidate aligned with their values. But again, gaps in the law have made this check hollow. Since Citizens United, “dark money” organizations that don’t disclose their donors have flooded federal elections with at least $4.3 billion in spending. In 2024, about a third of the super PAC spending in support of President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris traced back to such organizations.
These outcomes were not inevitable results of the Court’s decisions. Nothing in Citizens United precludes Congress from imposing stronger transparency requirements or more forceful rules to separate candidates and outside groups. Indeed, members of Congress have repeatedly tried to pass such legislation, only to be stymied by gridlock. These legislative failures have made the effects of the Court’s decision much worse than they otherwise might have been.
There is still reason to be optimistic, however. Periods of reform often follow scandal. A Congress determined to address the outsize role of money in politics should be bold. After the shock of Watergate, Congress passed a wide range of campaign finance and ethics changes that fundamentally reshaped the ethos of federal public service. The response to the corruption and crony capitalism of the late-19th-century Gilded Age was even more dramatic. Congress outlawed bribery and graft, banned corporate campaign spending, created the modern civil service, and sent major constitutional amendments to the states for ratification — including the 17th Amendment, which allowed for the popular election of U.S. senators, and the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote.
There is nothing stopping Congress from pursuing a similarly ambitious set of changes today, starting with a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and the Court’s other harmful campaign finance rulings. Even at a time of great political polarization, there is remarkably strong bipartisan support for this change. Twenty-five states have passed resolutions calling for such an amendment, which almost 80 percent of the American public favors.
