2 NATIONAL REPUBLICAN SENATORIAL COMMITTEE v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMM’N KAGAN, J., dissenting play. So Congress, sensibly enough, limited parties’ coordinated expenditures. By thus preventing circumvention of the basic contribution limits, Congress protected those limits’ capacity to suppress corruption. But today, the Court rewrites the rules, to allow circumvention of the contribution limits. The majority invalidates Congress’s restriction of coordinated expenditures, thus enabling a party to serve as an alternative checking account for a campaign. As a result, a donor will be able to give a party as much as half a million dollars (as compared to the $7,000 he can give directly to the candidate) to cover the candidate’s bills. And the candidate can seek just such a donation. So the Court ushers back in the same opportunities for quid pro quo corruption that the contribution limits were meant to check. Contra the majority, nothing in the First Amendment mandates that outcome—as indeed this Court has held before. The First Amendment permits campaign finance restrictions that are narrowly tailored to protect against quid pro quo corruption and its appearance. Caps on a party’s coordinated expenditures pass that test with flying colors. The caps prevent easy circumvention of contribution limits; and so the former, as much as the latter, are needed to avert corrupt deals between candidates and their supporters. That is not my personal theory. It is (now was) the Court’s. Twenty-five years ago, in a case called Colorado II, the Court considered—and rejected—the same arguments it finds irresistible today. See Federal Election Comm’n v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Comm., 533 U. S. 431 (2001). The majority must overrule Colorado II to arrive at its outcome—so, once again, disregards and disrespects the core legal principle of stare decisis. But there is a yet more important point here for the American political system: that the majority, also again, jettisons a rule needed to protect our democracy’s integrity. With respect, I dissent.