10 NATIONAL REPUBLICAN SENATORIAL COMMITTEE v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMM’N KAGAN, J., dissenting ballot candidates. Or else the money may be spent on independently produced advertisements. But what the money is not helpful for is funding John Smith’s own campaign activities, of whatever kind. Today, that constraint disappears. With no limits on coordinated expenditures, the party can serve as the candidate’s checking account. It can pay for everything John Smith (or any other candidate) needs—advertising of course, but also more prosaic things like catering, rent, and utilities. See supra, at 5–6. So the party can take any or every one of those $550,000 checks it receives from the John Smith Victory Fund—which, recall, the Fund has received from an individual or a corporate or interest group—and convert the money (in full) into a direct benefit for the candidate. What is supposed to be just the sum of an individual or group’s capped donations to 51 separate party committees instead goes in a single straight shot to John Smith, the candidate. And then that can happen again and again and again. It does not take much imagination to see how that scheme circumvents the contribution limit for a candidate, and raises the risk of both actual and apparent quid pro quo corruption. On a formal level, all base limits are complied with—$7,000 to the candidate, $10,000 each to state party committees, and $44,300 to the national one. Except that in the real world, the candidate can get all the money for his own campaign. So an ostensibly capped contribution of $7,000 becomes . . . a $550,000 contribution (again, $551,300 to be precise) to John Smith. And of course everyone knows this. The candidate recognizes both what the $550,000 contribution will do for him and where it originally came from. The donor understands the main points too. His measly $7,000 was not likely to have bought from the candidate anything of consequence. But $550,000 is a whole different story. And even if John Smith and all his wealthy donors remain scrupulously above board, the