462
REPUBLICAN FEDERAL CAMPAIGN COMM. Opinion of the Court
Finally, the Party falls back to claiming that, even if there is a threat of circumvention, the First Amendment demands a response better tailored to that threat than a limitation on spending, even coordinated spending. Id., at 46-48. The Party has two suggestions.
First, it says that better crafted safeguards are in place already, in particular the earmarking rule of § 441a(a)(8), which provides that contributions that "are in any way earmarked or otherwise directed through an intermediary or conduit to [a] candidate" are treated as contributions to the candidate. The Party says that this provision either suffices to address any risk of circumvention or would suffice if clarified to cover practices like tallying. Id., at 42, 47; see also 213 F. 3d, at 1232. This position, however, ignores the practical difficulty of identifying and directly combating circumvention under actual political conditions. Donations are made to a party by contributors who favor the party's candidates in races that affect them; donors are (of course) permitted to express their views and preferences to party officials; and the party is permitted (as we have held it must be) to spend money in its own right. When this is the environment for contributions going into a general party treasury, and candidate-fundraisers are rewarded with something less obvious than dollar-for-dollar pass-throughs (distributed through contributions and party spending), circumvention is obviously very hard to trace. The earmarking provision, even if it dealt directly with tallying, would reach only the most clumsy attempts to pass contributions through to candidates. To treat the earmarking provision as the outer limit of acceptable tailoring would disarm any serious effort to limit the corrosive effects of what Chief Judge Seymour called " 'understandings' regarding what donors give what amounts to the party, which candidates are to receive what funds from the party, and what interests particular donors are seeking to promote," id., at 1241 (dissenting opinion); see also Briffault, Political Parties and Campaign Finance Re-
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