The Supreme Court rarely breaks political news. But if you take its written opinion at face value, yesterday was an exception. Buried in the ruling striking down a key limit on party campaign spending was this gem: Vice President JD Vance intends to run for Senate in 2028.

If you're skeptical, you're not alone.

Why would a sitting vice president and a potential 2028 GOP presidential candidate opt to run for Senate again? He wouldn’t — and the Supreme Court very well knows that. But without that "fact," the Court would likely have had to dismiss the Republican Party’s lawsuit.

It was then-Senate candidate Vance who sued to challenge campaign coordination limits back in 2022, so without Vance as an active candidate, the Court would have lacked jurisdiction to hear the case at all.

And the conservative justices were not about to let that happen.

Dismissal would have wiped out a case Republicans had spent four years litigating. More practically, it would have denied the GOP a sizable war chest to aid its candidates in the 2026 midterms.

The conservative majority clearly wanted to decide this case now — so it simply declared Vance an active Senate candidate, a race he plainly has no intention of running.

To get around this, the Court seized on paperwork Vance had filed before he became Trump's running mate. As the majority put it, "Vance still maintains an active 'Statement of Candidacy' on file with the FEC indicating his intent to run for Senate in 2028, as well as a principal campaign committee (JD Vance for Senate) that has raised money for a Senate race."

According to the Court, that does the trick: "The statement of candidacy and the extant campaign committee cannot be ignored for justiciability purposes, and they establish that the case is not moot."

Courts are supposed to hear only actual cases and controversies, and to avoid deciding constitutional questions when they can. Federal candidates, for their part, are supposed to update their FEC paperwork rather than let it sit as a placeholder for offices they have no intention of seeking.

Bending the rules might be tempting in any one instance. In this instance, it was irresistible. The result is a gaping hole in our campaign finance system — one that both Vance and the Supreme Court majority happen to favor.

A genuinely conservative Court, confronted with this problem, would have dismissed the case for want of jurisdiction. It might even have called out Vance for failing to correct his federal filings. But that is not the Court we have.

Instead, the Court searched for a way to keep the case alive. It wanted to strike down a 50-year-old statute and overturn precedent — and it wanted to do so while the GOP could still cash in on a spending advantage for 2026.

Sadly, this is not the only time the current Court has behaved this way.

It gutted the last remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act protecting minority voters while insisting it was merely revising the legal test. When Republican-controlled states rushed to redraw maps at the last minute, the Court cleared the way — despite having blocked similar last-minute map changes in the past, when minority voters stood to benefit.

Most recently, it allowed Donald Trump to remove a Democratic commissioner from the agency charged with protecting consumers, while shielding a Federal Reserve Board member from the same fate — to the cheers of Wall Street.

The Supreme Court can act this way because too few people are willing to call it out.

Lawyers are reluctant to criticize the Court, for ideological and business reasons. Most reporters who cover the Court fear losing access to an already secretive body. Members of Congress avoid discussions of court reform because it lacks the urgency of issues like the economy.

The result is that the Supreme Court can take a case to achieve a result and pretend that JD Vance is running for U.S. Senate in 2028, and no one seems to notice or care. If the Court can get away with this in a high-profile election case, imagine what it's doing in matters few people are watching.

I will admit that if I had not argued this case and practiced in this area of law, I too would likely have glossed over the Court's dubious factual assertion regarding Vance's political future. But it shouldn't take those directly involved in a case to call this out and hold the Court accountable.

That is the role of the Court itself.

I do not pretend to know the future. I have no idea what will happen in the 2028 election, but I feel confident of this: big money will flood the system, JD Vance will not be a candidate for the U.S. Senate, and no one on the Supreme Court will bother to apologize.

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