Appeals Court Rejects GOP Bid to Remove Campaign Spending Limits

A federal appeals court on Sept. 5 rejected a Republican effort to allow political party committees to spend unlimited money on campaigns in coordination with the candidates they support.

The appeals court in the new ruling said that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2001 decision, which held the limits do not violate the First Amendment, is still binding.

Republicans argued that the decision was based “on the incorrect premise that all coordinated expenditures by political party committees may be treated as the functional equivalent of ‘contributions’ to candidates, as if they were no different from coordinated expenditures made by any other entity, and therefore could be restricted to prevent circumvention of  … base contribution limits.” The decision has also since been undercut by more recent Supreme Court decisions, they said.

A Sixth Circuit majority disagreed, upholding the limits.

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But until the Supreme Court itself addresses the 2001 ruling, the appeals court cannot act, U.S. Circuit Judge Jeffrey Sutton wrote for the majority.

“The Supreme Court has never overruled the decision,” he said. “Even when the Supreme Court embraces a new line of reasoning in a given area and even when that reasoning allegedly undercuts the foundation of a decision, it remains the Supreme Court’s job, not ours, to overrule it.”

While Congress has added three new exemptions to the coordinated expenditure limits since the decision, those changes do not invalidate the finding that the limits themselves are constitutional, he added later.

Many judges on the court joined with Sutton or concurred.

U.S. Circuit Judge John Bush said he concurred but that the Supreme Court should consider revisiting the 2001 decision because “it conflicts with recent decisions of the court” and because it did not “address history and tradition that also calls its holding into question.”

U.S. Circuit Judge Chad Readler, in the lone dissent, said that Supreme Court rulings usually control but “in the rare case where doctrinal developments have entirely displaced an earlier Supreme Court decision, we must acknowledge as much.” He quoted from a 2022 Supreme Court ruling that criticized lower courts for overlooking how the nation’s top court had moved on from a previous precedent.

Examining the limits in light of more recent decisions, the spending restrictions from the Federal Election Commission violate the First Amendment, Readler concluded.

The Federal Election Commission declined to comment on the ruling. A lawyer representing Vance, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and former Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.