The Supreme Court has laid waste to most of the nation’s efforts toward campaign finance reform and money-in-politics regulation over the past 15 years. Later this fall, it will have the opportunity to expand opportunities for corruption in the American political system even further.

In National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, the justices will consider whether Congress’s ban on “coordinated party expenditures”—that is, election spending by political parties that is coordinated with a federal candidate—violates the First Amendment. A victory for the NRSC would allow wealthy Americans to exceed donation limits by funneling the money through a political party instead, blowing yet another hole in federal campaign finance restrictions.

Federal campaign finance law sets limits on how much money an individual can donate to a candidate’s campaign for federal office. Congress imposed those limits to prevent the appearance or reality of quid pro quo corruption in the nation’s democratic structures. To that end, federal law also generally prohibits political parties from coordinating their campaign advertising expenditures with candidates and campaigns. This is designed to ensure that candidates and donors can’t evade contribution limits by giving the money to a third party that will do the same work on a candidate’s behalf.

In the 2001 case Federal Election Commission v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee, the FEC brought an enforcement action against a Republican Party group that ran attack ads against a Democratic congressional candidate in Colorado. (The courts refer to this case as Colorado II because it was the Supreme Court’s second ruling in the lawsuit. For clarity and brevity, I will do the same.) The GOP group argued that the enforcement action violated its First Amendment rights to free speech. The Supreme Court disagreed, applying the framework it had first developed in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976.

“There is no significant functional difference between a party’s coordinated expenditure and a direct party contribution to the candidate, and there is good reason to expect that a party’s right of unlimited coordinated spending would attract increased contributions to parties to finance exactly that kind of spending,” Justice David Souter wrote for the 5–4 majority. “Coordinated........

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