Democratic candidates for state and local office won decisive victories last month in dozens of elections across the country. But apparently, Republicans aren’t letting rejection get them down: At a Republican National Committee retreat held over the weekend, two of President Donald Trump’s senior strategists, Chris LaCivita and Tony Fabrizio, told party donors that the Supreme Court will soon make decisions that “have the ability to upend the political map.”
According to Axios, LaCivita and Fabrizio specifically cited Louisiana v. Callais, a challenge to the constitutionality of what’s left of the Voting Rights Act, and National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, a case in which the Court could also strike down as unconstitutional longstanding limits on how much money party committees can spend on federal elections “in coordination” with candidates.
Currently, federal law limits individual donations to candidates to a few thousand dollars per election, but allows those same donors to give hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to party committees—groups affiliated with political parties that register with the Federal Election Commission to raise and spend campaign funds. In NRSC v. FEC, a handful of Republican party committees, along with then-Senator, now-Vice President JD Vance, argue that restrictions on “coordinated expenditures” violate their First Amendment rights. Without these restrictions, rich people could use political parties as middlemen to shuffle huge sums of money to their preferred candidates, basically nullifying limitations on individual candidate contributions and opening the door to unchecked corruption.
Noel Francisco, who argued the case for the Republican committees on Tuesday, downplayed these risks at oral argument, suggesting that no one would go through such a “circuitous scheme” when they could just bribe someone directly. “If this were a real problem, you’d think that they’d have evidence of it occurring one time in all of American history, yet they don’t,” Francisco said.
As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out, they do. In the early 1970s, the dairy industry used Republican party committees to funnel millions of dollars to President Richard Nixon. “The industry landed a hundred-million-dollar subsidy from President Nixon in return,” said Sotomayor. “That’s what led to all of this congressional action.”
Congress passed campaign finance reform legislation in response to actual evidence of the corrupting effect of big money in politics. Yet over the past 15 years or so, the Supreme Court has repeatedly made it easier for the ultra-wealthy to exert outsized influence on the political process. Most infamously, in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, the Court gifted corporations a constitutional right to limitless campaign spending. Then, in McCutcheon v. FEC in 2014, the Court said that it’s unconstitutional to limit how much money rich people can contribute in total to all candidates or committees. In FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate in 2022, the Court simultaneously allowed candidates to use campaign contributions to repay personal loans, and declared that campaign finance restrictions are impermissible unless they target obvious quid pro quo corruption. (On Tuesday, Justice Samuel Alito lamented that Citizens United has been “unfairly maligned”; if so, it is only because those other cases haven’t been maligned enough.)
NRSC v. FEC may be the biggest campaign finance case since Citizens United. And it can’t be viewed in isolation. The Court’s decision in Callais could make it practically impossible for voters in racially gerrymandered districts to go to court for new, fair maps. The Court has already reimposed Texas’s congressional map for use in the 2026 midterm election, even though a federal court found that it was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. And it has suggested that federal courts should not strike down district maps if an election is, in the Supreme Court’s view, imminent, thus providing prospective gerrymanderers a roadmap to blocking judicial review of illegal gerrymanders: Change your districts on the eve of an election, and it’s too late for a court to change them back.
Altogether, the Court is maximizing the electoral influence of the rich and minimizing the electoral influence of people of color. And the Republican Party couldn’t be happier: Their strategy for holding power isn’t winning voters. It’s winning the Court.
