25 Colorado Republican Fed. Campaign Comm., 533 U.S. 431, 441–42 (2001); FEC v. NRA Political Victory Fund, 513 U.S. 88, 97 (1994). See also Buckley, 424 U.S. at 38. The infamous “footnote 48 of the McConnell opinion,” Maj. Op. at 23 n.13, also flatly contradicts the court: Justice KENNEDY’s contention that Buckley limits Congress to regulating contributions to a candidate ignores Buckley itself. There, we upheld FECA’s $25,000 limit on aggregate yearly contributions to candidates, political committees, and party committees out of recognition that FECA’s $1,000 limit on candidate contributions would be meaningless if individuals could instead make “huge contributions to the candidate’s political party.” Likewise, in [CalMed], we upheld FECA’s $5,000 limit on contributions to multicandidate political committees. It is no answer to say that such limits were justified as a means of preventing individuals from using parties and political committees as pass-throughs to circumvent FECA’s $1,000 limit on individual contributions to candidates. Given FECA’s definition of “contribution,” the $5,000 and $25,000 limits restricted not only the source and amount of funds available to parties and political committees to make candidate contributions, but also the source and amount of funds available to engage in express advocacy and numerous other noncoordinated expenditures. If indeed the First Amendment prohibited Congress from regulating contributions to fund the latter, the otherwise-easy-to-remedy exploitation of parties as pass-throughs (e.g., a strict limit on donations that could be used to fund candidate