The Supreme Court just handed the political parties their best day in a generation

The early reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC has been familiar and predictable: another campaign finance guardrail gone, more money washing into our elections, another step toward corruption. That take misses what actually happened. For the first time in two decades, the law moved to strengthen the political parties rather than the outside groups that have spent 15 years eclipsing them. If you have spent any of those years worried about dark money and unaccountable mega-donors, this is the decision you should have been rooting for.

Start with how the parties got so weak in the first place. The coordinated-spending caps the Supreme Court struck down were not the work of McCain-Feingold. They date to the post-Watergate amendments of 1974, capping how much a party committee could spend in direct coordination with its own nominee. What McCain-Feingold did in 2002 was different and arguably more devastating: it banned the parties’ soft money, the unlimited funds that had been their lifeblood. Then Citizens United and SpeechNow v. FEC gave birth to the super PAC, an entity that could raise and spend without limit so long as it stayed nominally “independent” of any candidate.

Put those developments together and you get the lopsided system we have lived under ever since. A billionaire’s super PAC could drop $20 million into a Senate race. A 501(c)(4) could spend millions more without disclosing a donor. But the actual political party — the permanent, accountable, transparent institution that recruits the candidate, vets her, and has to answer to voters — was frozen at a coordinated-spending number that looked like a rounding error. We built........

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