Updated on June 30 at 4:40 p.m.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday issued a major ruling on money in elections. By a vote of 6-3, the justices struck down a federal law that limited the amount of money that political parties can spend in coordination with a candidate for office. The majority opinion, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, agreed with the challengers that the coordinated expenditure limits violate the First Amendment.

Tuesday’s decision in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission overruled the court’s 2001 decision in Federal Election Commission v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee, in which the court – then by a vote of 5-4 – upheld the same limits.

Writing for the court, Kavanaugh said that Tuesday’s ruling “treats all political parties equally. It will allow all political parties—including the DNC and RNC and the respective Senate and House campaign committees, as well as other parties and party committees—to participate more freely and compete more fully in the political process, and to coordinate more closely with their candidates.”

In a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Elena Kagan argued that the majority’s opinion “rewrites the rules, to allow circumvention of the contribution limits.” In so doing, she said, “the majority … jettisons a rule needed to protect our democracy’s integrity.”

The expenditure limits at the center of the case are part of the Federal Election Campaign Act. In 2022, four challengers – then-Sen. J.D. Vance, then Rep. Steve Chabot (a Republican from Ohio), and the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee (which focus on electing Republicans to the U.S. Senate and House, respectively) – went to federal court in Cincinnati. They argued that the coordinated party limits violate the First Amendment by (among other things) preventing the committees from working with candidates to ensure that their advertisements have the same political message.

The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit upheld the restrictions. Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton acknowledged that the challengers had made “fair points,” but he concluded that the court of appeals was bound by the Supreme Court’s decision in the 2001 Colorado case.

When the challengers asked the Supreme Court to review the 6th Circuit’s decision, the Trump administration agreed that the restrictions violate the First Amendment, and it urged the justices to weigh in. With the federal government no longer defending the limits, the court appointed Roman Martinez, a former clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts and then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh, to do so.

In his opinion for the majority, Kavanaugh explained that under the Supreme Court’s current campaign finance cases, the only rationale for campaign-finance restrictions is to prevent “quid pro quo” corruption – that is, “contributions in exchange for official action.” Supporters of the coordinated-expenditure limits, Kavanaugh noted, insist that those limits must remain in place to prevent donors from circumventing the limits on contributions by donating money to a political party and then instructing the political party to use that donation “in order to support a particular candidate—a practice referred to as ‘earmarking.’”

But there are other measures in place to prevent such circumvention that do not restrict speech in the same way that the coordinated-expenditure limits do, Kavanaugh emphasized: the base limits on contributions, federal laws that treat “earmarked” contributions as contributions to a candidate, and federal disclosure laws. Moreover, Kavanaugh added, most states do not impose these kinds of coordinated-expenditure limits in their elections, but “‘no evidence of corruption’ via circumvention ‘has materialized.’” By contrast, Kavanaugh wrote, the coordinated-expenditure limit “imposes a severe and direct restriction on free speech and infringes fundamental First Amendment values. Otherwise stated, the restriction on political-party coordinated expenditures” does not pass the stringent constitutional test: it “is ‘disproportionate’ and is not ‘necessary’ and ‘narrowly tailored’ to the Government’s interest in preventing circumvention of the base contribution limits.”

Kavanaugh rejected arguments that the court should adhere to its decision in the 2001 case, comparing that ruling to “a three-legged stool where all three legs have already been knocked out.” The rationale of that decision, he said, “has been rejected by subsequent cases and is no longer good law in light of the Court’s more recent precedents.”

Kagan argued in her dissenting opinion that the court’s ruling “ushers in the same opportunities for quid pro quo corruption that the contribution limits were meant to check.” “As a result,” she wrote, “a donor will be able to give a party as much as half a million dollars (as compared to the $7,000 he can give directly to the candidate) to cover the candidate’s bills. And the candidate can seek just such a donation.”