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On a single day last year, one of President Donald Trump’s joint fundraising committees sent nearly $1.5 million to 46 Republican Party committees in states and territories. Each of them, in turn, immediately routed those exact same amounts to the Republican National Committee.

Routine transfers like those are a hallmark of how joint fundraising committees move money through the party system. But a recent Supreme Court ruling has raised their stakes: Political parties may now fully coordinate with federal candidates on how to spend that money.

In National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, the court on June 30 struck down decades-old limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates for Congress and the presidency. The decision instantly expanded how millions of dollars already sitting in joint fundraising committees, or JFCs, can be used. The 6-3 ruling from the court’s conservative majority gave the parties and JFCs significantly more power, with Justice Elena Kagan noting in her dissent that “the party can serve as the candidate’s checking account.”

It will be months before FEC filings reflect any resulting spending shifts. But how parties and JFCs wield this new authority is poised to become a defining subplot in the run-up to the midterm elections.

Used widely by both parties, JFCs work by pulling in large checks from donors and splitting the money across multiple committees according to a predetermined formula that adheres to federal contribution limits.

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Before the ruling, once funds flowed into party accounts, the parties could not legally coordinate with candidates on how to spend most of it. Instead, they had to largely rely on independent expenditures. Under the Federal Election Campaign Act, national party committees were limited to coordinated spending of between $65,300 and $130,600 for individual House candidates, depending on the size of the state; between $130,600 and about $4.1 million for Senate; and up to $32 million for a presidential candidate.

Those firewalls are now gone, and JFC transfers can flow directly into candidate-approved ad campaigns, polling, voter targeting and core campaign strategy.

“Joint fundraising committees will continue to proliferate. While the trend toward joint fundraising is already well underway, its value just increased,” attorneys Michael Bayes and Matthew Petersen of the Washington-based law firm Holtzman Vogel wrote in The National Law Review. “Candidates and national party committees are even more incentivized to raise funds together now that they also may spend those funds together.”

The ruling provides ultrawealthy Americans seeking to influence candidates an avenue to “pump money” into either the parties or the JFCs closely tied to their preferred candidates, said Michael Beckel, the director of money in politics reform at the nonpartisan research group Issue One.

“That’s a huge amplifier of their voices and their power in the political process,” Beckel told OpenSecrets.

During the current election cycle, the 906 active JFCs ended the first quarter with nearly $105 million in cash on hand, FEC records show. The top 10 JFCs held more than $63 million, and four bearing Trump’s name banked nearly $37 million.

The court’s ruling........

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