Justice Sotomayor smacks Kavanaugh with stinging dissent in campaign spending case

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor smacked her conservative colleagues with a stinging rebuke for their decision to gut another campaign finance statute by overturning a decades-old precedent.

The court struck down federal limits on how much money a political committee can spend in coordination with candidates in the case National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, and Sotomayor ripped the 6-3 conservative majority, questioned their legal reasoning and accused them of flaunting their own power.

"The majority would much rather explain why it thinks settled law is wrong than go to the trouble of establishing what it should — an unusual need to start all over," she wrote. "So today’s supposed stare decisis analysis mainly just recounts why the majority, had it been the majority in 2001, would have decided Colorado II differently."

Sotomayor pointed out that Justice Brett Kavanaugh had essentially rewritten Justice Clarence Thomas's dissent in the Colorado decision upholding restrictions on political campaign spending and turned it into the controlling law.

"Almost to flaunt the point, the analysis gives pride of place to JUSTICE THOMAS’s dissent in that case; if only the rest of the majority had been there to join him!" she wrote. "Today’s decision thus can join the parade of those recently overruling established law because of a new majority’s new outlook on a consequential matter."

Sotomayor noted the court used to insist on a "special justification," above and beyond simple error, to overturn past legal precedent, and she accused her conservative colleagues of skipping past that requirement and changing settled law without even bothering to justify their decisions.

"Perhaps the majority thinks (I am guessing here, given the majority’s unwillingness to deal in the specifics of campaign finance) that no quid pro quo can occur in the above scenario because the $550,000 payment to the Victory Fund is unaccompanied by directions to use the money for the candidate," she wrote. "If so, that would be wrong."