J.D. Vance’s Master Plan For Citizens United 2.0
Vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance superimposed on the Supreme Court. (AP Photo / J. Scott Applewhite and Matt Slocum)
The vice presidential candidate is helping spearhead a lawsuit designed to prompt the Supreme Court’s destruction of some of the country’s last remaining campaign finance laws.
Vice presidential candidate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and other Republicans are spearheading a lawsuit aiming to prompt the Supreme Court to move beyond its landmark Citizens United decision and tear down some of the last remaining rules designed to prevent megadonors’ money from influencing public officials. What’s more, Vance has ties to one of the appeals judges who agreed with the effort and just helped tee up the case for Supreme Court consideration.
If the Supreme Court ends up hearing Vance’s new case, it would give the additional three President Donald Trump-appointed judges who were not on the court during Citizens United an opportunity to go even further than that landmark decision — an outcome hinted at by Justice Clarence Thomas in his Citizens United concurring opinion saying the ruling didn’t go far enough.
Experts say Vance’s lawsuit, as well as a new regulatory decision allowing a candidate to work hand in hand with a deep-pocketed outside election group, is part of a coordinated effort, decades in the making, to destroy the last vestiges of campaign finance laws designed to prevent the wealthy and the powerful from spending limitless amounts directly on candidates and demanding favors in return.
In 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission used a relatively esoteric and narrow campaign finance dispute to issue a sweeping precedent removing restrictions on independent election expenditures as long as they were “not coordinated with a candidate.” The decision gave rise to “independent expenditure-only committees,” or super PACs, which are political action groups that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns, so long as they do not directly coordinate such expenditures with candidates for public office.
Vance’s new lawsuit — filed alongside the National Republican Senatorial and Congressional Committees, and former Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) — aims to abolish some of the last barriers separating candidates and buckets of cash from corporations and wealthy donors. In specific, the case argues for permitting megadonors to use national party committees to directly coordinate their limitless spending directly with candidates.
Though that argument lost earlier this month in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, Ohio, the case succeeded in prompting judges on that lower court to call for clarification from the Supreme Court.
If the high court heeds those calls and ends up hearing the case on appeal, conservative justices could agree with Vance — or use the case to issue an even more expansive set of precedents deregulating the campaign finance system.
“I think you would see party committees becoming huge conduits for big donors,” said the Campaign Legal Center’s Tara Malloy about what could happen if Vance’s lawsuit is successful.“But they would do so in a way that would really make them channels of corruption. Because unlike a super PAC, a party committee is uniquely tied to their candidates and here they’re seeking to spend unlimited amounts of money in direct coordination with candidates.”
In his Citizens United concurring opinion, Thomas made clear that he supports no limits on campaign spending and believes disclosure requirements are a violation of the First Amendment.
“The Court’s constitutional analysis does not go far enough,” Thomas wrote about the Citizens United decision. “Disclaimer and disclosure requirements enable private citizens and elected officials to implement political strategies specifically calculated to curtail campaign-related activity and prevent the lawful, peaceful exercise of First Amendment rights.”
Friends In High Places
Vance’s lawsuit was initially filed in 2022, and in their plea for the appeals court to hear the case, lawyers for Vance and his Republican colleagues asked the court that if they ruled against them, the appeals court should “promptly… permit Plaintiffs to seek Supreme Court review,” according to court documents filed on March 5.
That plea was heard six months later on Sept. 5, when a 16-judge panel on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals — which hears cases from lower courts in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee — ruled against Vance and his Republican allies, stating that circuit courts do not have the power to overturn Supreme Court precedent limiting coordination between national party committees and candidates.
However, two of those judges, both appointed by Trump, issued opinions stating that they agreed with Vance’s lawsuit to overturn coordination limits, but ruled against it citing that circuit courts do not have the authority to overrule Supreme Court precedent.
“These limits run afoul of modern campaign-finance doctrine and burden parties’ and candidates’ core political rights,” wrote Judge Amul Thapar. “For the plaintiffs, however, our court is not the proper audience for these concerns.”
Thapar is the former boss of Vance’s wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, when she worked as a law clerk in a Kentucky district court.
Jane Stranch, another judge on the panel who didn’t agree with the plaintiffs, noted in her opinion that the suit was expressly designed to allow the Supreme Court to overturn its previous ruling on national party committees coordinating with candidates.
“The plaintiffs filed this lawsuit to ask the Supreme Court to overrule its decision in FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee, and urge us to rule against them ‘promptly’ to facilitate the higher court’s review,” wrote Stranch, who was appointed by President Barack Obama. “That posture should have made this an easy case, one we could unanimously resolve in a handful of pages. It instead produces handfuls of opinions encouraging the Supreme Court to rework campaign finance, First Amendment, and constitutional law in new and audacious ways.”
The case is the latest attempt to dismantle campaign finance laws, said Chris deLaubenfels, general counsel and legal director for End Citizens United, an advocacy group dedicated to getting big money out of politics.
“It’s a blatant power grab aimed at giving their corporate special interest and billionaire donors more power and influence over government,” deLaubenfels said in a statement to The Lever. “While we’re encouraged by the Sixth Circuit’s ruling to strike down this challenge, we have no faith in the corrupt Supreme Court majority.”
At the same time, a new Federal Elections Commission (FEC) ruling just removed one of the main firewalls stopping independent organizations like super PACs from using their unlimited pools of cash to directly work with candidates’ campaigns. The ruling was issued at the behest of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who wished to merge his campaign committee with a super PAC to create a joint fundraising committee.
Vance’s and Graham’s moves are a part of a decades-old master plan to dismantle laws aimed at curtailing corporate influence in elections.
In 1971, soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote a memorandum that claimed corporations were under “broad attack” and that business elites needed to come together to work on the “survival of what we call the free enterprise system.”
In the memo, Powell wrote that the Supreme Court “may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.” In recent years, the Supreme Court has rolled back campaign finance laws, legalized bribery, promoted corporate interests by weakening environmental regulations, among other rulings.
Vance did not respond to a request for comment.
“The Goal Here Is To Eviscerate”
At the heart of Vance and the National Republican Senatorial and Congressional Committees’ lawsuit is a 2001 Supreme Court ruling that barred party committees like the National Republican Senatorial and Congressional Committees and the Democratic Senatorial and Congressional Committees from coordinating spending with candidates.
In the 2001 case — called FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee — Colorado Republicans attempted to overturn the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act, which limited coordinated spending between national party committees and federal candidates.