There is a specter of inevitability hanging over much of the Supreme Court’s current term. It is unlikely that any legal argument could persuade the Court’s Republican majority to uphold bans on anti-LGBTQ conversion therapy, for example, or to preserve the Voting Rights Act. These are issues where Republican judges have wildly divergent views from Democratic jurists. And, on a 6-3 Republican Court, that means that the GOP’s view wins.

That specter looms particularly large over National Republican Senatorial Committee (“NRSC”) v. FEC, which the Supreme Court will hear on Tuesday, December 9. In that case, the GOP asks the justices to repeal a complicated campaign finance scheme limiting the amount of money big donors can funnel to candidates. And, given this Court’s history in campaign finance cases, it is all but certain that Republicans will win this case.

Few issues split the two parties more cleanly than campaign finance regulation. Broadly speaking, the Democratic justices believe that too much money in politics is inherently corrupting, because, as Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in a 2014 dissent, “a few large donations” can “drown out the voices of the many.”

Under this view, big campaign donations breed a government that is responsive only to a small group of very wealthy donors. In Breyer’s words, “where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard.”

The Republican justices, meanwhile, tolerate campaign finance laws in only the narrowest of circumstances. As five Republicans concluded in Citizens United v. FEC (2010), money and politics may only be regulated to prevent “‘quid pro quo’ corruption,” such as when a donor explicitly promises to donate to a senator’s campaign in return for that senator’s vote on a particular bill.

Under the Republican view, laws that merely seek to limit the influence of the very wealthy, such as by preventing them from buying access to lawmakers, are constitutionally forbidden.

The specific law at issue in NRSC limits how much party organizations, such as the Democratic or Republican National Committees, may spend in coordination with individual candidates for federal office. The idea is to prevent donors from evading the cap on donations to candidates, which is currently $3,500 per federal election, by laundering a much larger donation through a party committee like the DNC or the RNC.

In theory, this law might even comply with the rigid limits on campaign finance law that Republican justices imposed in Citizens United. As the Democratic Party argues in a brief defending the law, “an unbroken line of precedent” stretching back to the 1970s “holds that Congress

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