The Supreme Court’s decision in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC, striking down FECA’s limits on political-party coordinated expenditures and overruling Colorado II, is a welcome and overdue correction.  For a quarter century, campaign finance doctrine maintained an artificial constitutional distinction between parties and the candidates they exist to elect—treating a party’s spending in cooperation with its own nominees as a species of suspect, regulable activity, even while the party’s independent spending on the very same candidates went unregulated. Justice Kavanaugh’s opinion is right to recognize that this line never made much sense. Parties and candidates are not adversaries who happen to share an interest; they are, as Justice Thomas put it in his Colorado II dissent, engaged in the ordinary, expected work of a party system—choosing standard-bearers, building platforms, and pooling resources to get them elected.

Treating coordination itself as a corruption risk, rather than treating actual earmarked, candidate-directed quid pro quo arrangements as the risk, mistook the healthy mechanics of party politics for a loophole to be closed.  Nor was the Court alone in recognizing the harms created by Colorado I and II.  In support of the decision, the Court quoted my fellow co-Directors of the Democracy Project, Bob Bauer and Rick Pildes, who had noted that “many in the political reform community support an end to the limits” on party-coordinated expenditures.

The earlier mistake was not costless. The doctrine the Court has now abandoned compounded the decline of political parties as organizing institutions in American democracy. By capping what national and state party committees could spend in coordination with their own candidates while leaving outside spenders almost entirely free, the law systematically disadvantaged parties relative to every other player in the campaign finance ecosystem. The predictable result was not less money in politics but the same money flowing through different channels—channels far less accountable and far less programmatic than parties themselves.

This is the dynamic that Pam Karlan and I have called the hydraulics of campaign finance regulation: money under pressure does not disappear, it finds the path of least resistance. Squeeze coordinated party spending, and the same dollars migrate to Super PACs, 501(c)(4)s, and other independent-expenditure vehicles that face no coordination limits, minimal disclosure obligations in some cases, and—crucially—no responsibility to the broader coalition-building function that parties perform. Donors did not stop spending; they stopped spending through parties. The consequence has been a campaign finance system increasingly dominated by single-issue and candidate-specific vehicles with no stake in governing coalitions, party platforms, or the discipline of having to answer for a ticket rather than a single race.

That matters because healthy democracies have historically depended on parties to perform a mediating function that no other institution replicates: translating diffuse voter aspirations into coherent programs, vetting and disciplining candidates who run under a shared label, and then converting electoral victory into the capacity to govern. Parties are what allow an electorate’s preferences to be aggregated into something a legislature or an executive can implement, and what allow voters to hold a governing coalition accountable at the next election. Weakening parties relative to unaccountable outside spenders does not reduce the influence of money in politics; it severs influence from responsibility. A Super PAC owes nothing to a platform, a coalition, or a future election in the way a party does.

NRSC v. FEC points toward a needed recalibration. Having recognized that coordination between parties and candidates is not itself a constitutional problem, the Court has cleared away one major distortion in the hydraulic system. But it is only the first step. The deeper distortion is that parties remain hemmed in on the receiving end—the base contribution limits that apply to gifts to parties are themselves badly mismatched to the scale at which Super PACs and dark-money groups now operate. If parties are to become genuine focal points of political organization again—better venues for money than unaccountable outside groups—the contribution limits governing what individuals and organizations may give directly to parties should be substantially liberalized, perhaps eliminated altogether for party committees, even as disclosure and anti-earmarking rules remain robust. The goal is not less regulation of money in politics but a more sensible channeling of it: toward institutions built to coordinate, deliberate, and govern, and away from the diffuse and unaccountable vehicles that have filled the vacuum parties were forced to leave.