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REPUBLICAN FEDERAL CAMPAIGN COMM. Opinion of the Court
cal identity" between party and candidate, 518 U. S., at 622- 623, but rather decided that some of a party's expenditures could be understood as being independent and therefore immune to limitation just as an individual's independent expenditure would be, id., at 619-623.
Second, we do not understand the Party to be arguing that associations in general or political parties in particular may claim a variety of First Amendment protection that is different in kind from the speech and associational rights of their members.10 The Party's point, rather, is best understood as a factual one: coordinated spending is essential to parties because "a party and its candidate are joined at the hip," Brief for Respondent 31, owing to the very conception of the party as an organization formed to elect candidates. Parties, thus formed, have an especially strong working relationship with their candidates, id., at 26, and the speech this special relationship facilitates is much more effective than independent speech, id., at 29.
10 We have repeatedly held that political parties and other associations derive rights from their members. E. g., Norman v. Reed, 502 U. S. 279, 288 (1992); Tashjian v. Republican Party of Conn., 479 U. S. 208, 214-215 (1986); Roberts v. United States Jaycees, 468 U. S. 609, 622-623 (1984); NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, 357 U. S. 449, 459-460 (1958); Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U. S. 234, 250 (1957). While some commentators have assumed that associations' rights are also limited to the rights of the individuals who belong to them, e. g., Supreme Court, 1996 Term, Leading Cases, Associational Rights of Political Parties, 111 Harv. L. Rev. 197, 315, n. 50 (1997), that view has been subject to debate, see, e. g., Gottlieb, Fleshing Out the Right of Association, 49 Albany L. Rev. 825, 826, 836-837 (1985); see generally Issacharoff, Private Parties with Public Purposes, 101 Colum. L. Rev. 274 (2001). There is some language in our cases supporting the position that parties' rights are more than the sum of their members' rights, e. g., California Democratic Party v. Jones, 530 U. S. 567, 575 (2000) (referring to the "special place" the First Amendment reserves for the process by which a political party selects a standard bearer); Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party, 520 U. S. 351, 373 (1997) (Stevens, J., dissenting), but we have never settled upon the nature of any such difference and have no reason to do so here.
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