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REPUBLICAN FEDERAL CAMPAIGN COMM. Opinion of the Court
parties to exercise their First Amendment rights to support their candidates," and that "[i]n reality, political parties are dominant players, second only to the candidates themselves, in federal elections." Brief for Paul Allen Beck et al. as Amici Curiae 5-6. For the Party to claim after all these years of strictly limited coordinated spending that unlimited coordinated spending is essential to the nature and functioning of parties is in reality to assert just that "metaphysical identity," 518 U. S., at 623, between free-spending party and candidate that we could not accept in Colorado I.11
2
There is a different weakness in the seemingly unexceptionable premise that parties are organized for the purpose of electing candidates, Brief for Respondent 26 ("Parties exist precisely to elect candidates that share the goals of their party"), so that imposing on the way parties serve that function is uniquely burdensome. The fault here is not so much metaphysics as myopia, a refusal to see how the power of money actually works in the political structure.
When we look directly at a party's function in getting and spending money, it would ignore reality to think that the party role is adequately described by speaking generally of
11 To say that history and common sense make us skeptical that parties are uniquely incapacitated by the challenged limitations is not to deny that limiting parties' coordinated expenditures while permitting unlimited independent expenditures prompts parties to structure their spending in a way that they would not otherwise choose. See post, at 470. And we acknowledge below, infra, at 453-455, that limiting coordinated expenditures imposes some burden on parties' associational efficiency. But the very evidence cited by the dissent suggests that it is nonetheless possible for parties, like individuals and nonparty groups, to speak independently. E. g., App. 218 (statement of Professor Anthony Corrado) ("[I]t is likely that parties will allocate an increasing amount of money to independent expenditure efforts in the future"); id., at 159 (affidavit of Donald K. Bain, Chairman of the Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee) (describing ability to make independent expenditures as "welcome").
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