Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus and Louisiana Republicans filed a joint lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia asking for permission to set up an independent account that could raise and spend potentially enormous sums of money to help federal candidates, according to The Associated Press.
Under the current rules, the RNC may only accept $32,400 each year from donors, and local-level parties are capped at $10,000, the AP reported.
"The patchwork of limits on political speech undermines the First Amendment and puts high transparency, full-disclosure groups like the RNC on an unequal footing with other political entities," RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement, according to the AP. "We are asking that political parties be treated equally under the law."
Super PACs, which operate independently of the political parties or the candidates they support, can raise unlimited money from allies, including corporations and unions, the AP reported.
While emphasizing that they do not want to accept money from corporations or unions as super PACs do, RNC officials said they want to have the same abilities to establish independent accounts that can buy ads, send campaign mail and make phone calls, according to the AP.
"In an era when independent-expenditure accounts can solicit unlimited contributions and spend enormous amounts to influence political races, political parties are constitutionally entitled to compete equally with them with their own independent campaign activity," said James Bopp Jr., the lawsuit's lead attorney, the AP reported.
"If the RNC is successful, we will again see party committees brazenly soliciting $1 million contributions from wealthy contributors seeking to directly purchase influence over candidates and officeholders, with the party committees acting as the sales agent," said Lawrence Noble, general counsel to the FEC from 1987 to 2000 and now an adviser at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, according to the AP.
The RNC has helped to chip away at campaign finance rules in recent years, most recently joining a lawsuit that ended a two-year, $123,200 aggregate limit on donations, the AP reported. Now, donors can give the maximum amount to as many candidates as they want, but the caps on how much a donor can give to each candidate remain.
