6 NATIONAL REPUBLICAN SENATORIAL COMMITTEE v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMM’N Opinion of the Court party coordinated-expenditure limits will not apply to him. Brief for Court-Appointed Amicus Curiae 13. The Court need not speculate about Vice President Vance’s future runs for office, however, because the Vice President still maintains an active “Statement of Candidacy” on file with the FEC indicating his intent to run for Senate in 2028, as well as a principal campaign committee (JD Vance for Senate) that has raised money for a Senate race. The statement of candidacy and the extant campaign committee cannot be ignored for justiciability purposes, and they establish that the case is not moot. We therefore turn to the First Amendment issue. III We begin with First Amendment fundamentals. The text of the First Amendment provides that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” The First Amendment embodies “a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.” Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Comm. v. Federal Election Comm’n, 518 U. S. 604, 629 (1996) (Colorado I) (Kennedy, J., concurring in judgment and dissenting in part) (quotation marks omitted). The First Amendment’s protection of free speech has its “fullest and most urgent application precisely to the conduct of campaigns for political office.” Federal Election Comm’n v. Ted Cruz for Senate, 596 U. S. 289, 302 (2022) (quotation marks omitted). With respect to campaignrelated spending, the “central holding in Buckley v. Valeo is that spending money on one’s own speech must be permitted.” Colorado I, 518 U. S., at 627 (opinion of Kennedy, J.) (citation omitted). For that reason, this Court has determined that political parties—as well as candidates, private individuals, and outside groups—may make unlimited independent expenditures during political