Party Machines Weren’t So Bad After All

This is not a sentence written often lately, but the U.S. Supreme Court has just done a great service to American democracy. On June 30, the Court struck down federal limits on the amount of money that political parties can spend in coordination with individual federal candidates. Some early reports on National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission represented the 6–3 decision as a victory for big money. To some extent, it is—but for once, in a good way. Years of…