SCOTUS Sides With Republicans In Political Ad Ruling

Key Detail:

• The Supreme Court ruled Friday that political parties can receive the same discounted broadcast ad rates as candidates, a decision that benefits Republican committees ahead of the November midterm elections.

The Supreme Court on Friday ruled that political parties are entitled to the same discounted radio/ television advertising rates as candidates, handing Republicans a late-stage victory ahead of the midterm elections.

The unsigned emergency order said Republican Party committees were likely to suffer “irreparable harm” if they had to pay higher rates, which would hamper “their efforts to reach the electorate in the critical weeks leading up to the midterms.” 

The majority said that injury “implicates their First Amendment rights to speak and coordinate their political activities freely.”

The court did not release a vote count, as is common in emergency applications. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

The case turns on the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, which requires broadcasters to sell ad time to candidates at low rates in the weeks before an election. The statute does not expressly extend that lowest-unit-rate benefit to party committees. That distinction has generally favored Democrats, whose candidates typically raise more money than their party committees; Republicans have often seen the reverse.

Republicans have sought to close that gap. Last term, in a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the court sided with Republican groups seeking to lift coordinated spending limits between parties and candidates. After that ruling, Republicans planned to coordinate with candidates to buy ads at the lower rates. Four Democratic candidates from battleground states — Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, former Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, former Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet of Michigan — then challenged an FCC notice informing parties and committees that they would receive the discounted rates.

On Aug. 25, a divided Fourth Circuit panel agreed with the Democrats. Judge Robert B. King, a Clinton appointee, wrote that the statute “unambiguously” limits the low rates to candidates, not parties, and that the FCC notice was a “significant and unilateral expansion” of the rule. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a Reagan appointee, dissented, calling the decision “nothing less than an upending of settled campaign finance ground rules right in the middle of an election season.”

National Republican groups then asked the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing that the appeals court had rewritten “longstanding rules about preferential broadcast rates for political ads” in the middle of election season.