2 MCCUTCHEON v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMM’N Syllabus base limits appropriately served the Government’s anticorruption interest, the District Court concluded that the aggregate limits survived First Amendment scrutiny because they prevented evasion of the base limits. Held: The judgment is reversed, and the case is remanded. 893 F. Supp. 2d 133, reversed and remanded. CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS, joined by JUSTICE SCALIA, JUSTICE KENNEDY, and JUSTICE ALITO, concluded that the aggregate limits are invalid under the First Amendment. Pp. 7–40. (a) Appellants’ substantial First Amendment challenge to the current system of aggregate limits merits plenary consideration. Pp. 7– 14. (1) In Buckley, this Court evaluated the constitutionality of the original contribution and expenditure limits in FECA. Buckley distinguished the two types of limits based on the degree to which each encroaches upon protected First Amendment interests. It subjected expenditure limits to “the exacting scrutiny applicable to limitations on core First Amendment rights of political expression.” 424 U. S., at 44–45. But it concluded that contribution limits impose a lesser restraint on political speech and thus applied a lesser but still “rigorous standard of review,” id., at 29, under which such limits “may be sustained if the State demonstrates a sufficiently important interest and employs means closely drawn to avoid unnecessary abridgement of associational freedoms,” id., at 25. Because the Court found that the primary purpose of FECA—preventing quid pro quo corruption and its appearance—was a “sufficiently important” governmental interest, id., at 26–27, it upheld the base limit under the “closely drawn” test, id., at 29. After doing so, the Court devoted only one paragraph of its 139-page opinion to the aggregate limit then in place under FECA, noting that the provision “ha[d] not been separately addressed at length by the parties.” Id., at 38. It concluded that the aggregate limit served to prevent circumvention of the base limit and was “no more than a corollary” of that limit. Id., at 38. Pp. 7–9. (2) There is no need in this case to revisit Buckley’s distinction between contributions and expenditures and the corresponding distinction in standards of review. Regardless whether strict scrutiny or the “closely drawn” test applies, the analysis turns on the fit between the stated governmental objective and the means selected to achieve that objective. Here, given the substantial mismatch between the Government’s stated objective and the means selected to achieve it, the aggregate limits fail even under the “closely drawn” test. Buckley’s ultimate conclusion about the constitutionality of the aggregate limit in place under FECA does not control here. Buckley spent just three sentences analyzing that limit, which had not been