Cite as: 533 U. S. 431 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
B
Since there is no recent experience with unlimited coordinated spending, the question is whether experience under the present law confirms a serious threat of abuse from the unlimited coordinated party spending as the Government contends. Cf. Burson v. Freeman, 504 U. S. 191, 208 (1992) (opinion of Blackmun, J.) (noting difficulty of mustering evidence to support long-enforced statutes). It clearly does. Despite years of enforcement of the challenged limits, substantial evidence demonstrates how candidates, donors, and parties test the limits of the current law, and it shows beyond serious doubt how contribution limits would be eroded if inducement to circumvent them were enhanced by declaring parties' coordinated spending wide open.19
and nonparty groups. The dissent does not take issue with this justification as a theoretical matter. See also 213 F. 3d 1221, 1232 (CA10 2000) (Court of Appeals acknowledging circumvention as a possible "avenue of abuse").
19 In Colorado I, the principal opinion suggested that the Party Expenditure Provision was not enacted out of "a special concern about the potentially 'corrupting' effect of party expenditures, but rather for the constitutionally insufficient purpose of reducing what [Congress] saw as wasteful and excessive campaign spending." 518 U. S., at 618. That observation was relevant to our examination of the Party Expenditure Provision as applied to independent expenditures, see id., at 617-618, limits on which were invalidated with regard to other political actors in Buckley in part because they were justified by concern with wasteful campaign spending, Buckley, 424 U. S., at 57. Our point in Colorado I was that there was no evidence that Congress had a special motivation regarding parties that would justify limiting their independent expenditures after similar limits imposed on other spenders had been invalidated. As for the Party Expenditure Provision's application to coordinated expenditures, on the other hand, the evidence discussed in the text suggests that the anticircumvention rationale that justifies other coordinated expenditure limits, see Buckley, supra, at 46-47, is at work here as well. The dissent ignores this distinction, post, at 475, but neither the dissent nor the Party seriously argues that Congress was not concerned with circumvention of contribution limits using parties as conduits. All acknowledge that Congress enacted other measures prompted by just that concern. See post, at 481;
457
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