The Supreme Court handed Republican campaign arms a significant campaign finance victory on Friday, scuttling an effort by Democrats to slash the GOP’s cash advantage in the midterm elections.
The high court ruled 8-1 to halt a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit that excluded political parties and joint fundraising committees from accessing favorable television advertisement rates reserved for political candidates. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only noted dissent to the order. The Friday ruling came months after the Supreme Court handed the National Republican Senatorial Committee a major win earlier this year by striking down limits on coordinated spending between political parties and candidates as unconstitutional, opening up the floodgates to more spending.
The per curiam ruling Friday said the 4th Circuit did not have jurisdiction to toss out the Federal Communications Commission notice from March that said political parties and joint fundraising committees, when working in coordination with the candidate, were entitled to the favorable advertisement rates.
“The Communications Act thus contemplates that an aggrieved party will file an application for review with the Commission, that the Commission will resolve that application by order, and that public notice of that order will issue before an aggrieved party may petition for further review in federal court,” the justices’ unsigned order said. “Because the candidates’ application for review was pending when they filed their petition for review, the Fourth Circuit likely lacked statutory jurisdiction to address their challenge.”
The majority also found that the ruling should be stayed because Republican campaign committees would face irreparable harm while legal challenges to the public notice continue, pointing to the higher advertisement rates they would have to pay for campaign advertisements for the midterm elections if the Supreme Court did not intervene.
“Current and future recissions will require the party committees to pay more for advertising space, thereby hampering their efforts to reach the electorate in the critical weeks leading up to the midterms,” the per curiam ruling reads. “That injury, which implicates their First Amendment rights to speak and coordinate their political activities freely cannot be remedied after the fact through refunds or reimbursements.”
Jackson issued a brief dissent from the ruling, saying she believed the Republican campaign arms did not appear likely to succeed on the merits in their claims that the 4th Circuit lacked jurisdiction to make the ruling.
The ruling will also allow Democratic Party campaign arms and Democrat-aligned joint fundraising committees, working in coordination with Democratic candidates, to access the lower “candidate rate” for advertisement buys, but it is a more significant win for Republicans because of the GOP’s massive cash advantage at the party level.
The RNC has significantly more money than the DNC heading into the hotly contested midterm elections, while Democratic candidates have individually outraised Republican candidates in many of the most hotly contested races. If the 4th Circuit ruling had remained in place, the GOP cash advantage at the party level would be hampered by having to pay high advertisement rates compared to Democrats, who would likely spend more on advertising using candidates’ individual war chests.
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The NRSC celebrated the ruling, saying it ensures that they will be able to go forward with maximizing “the fall of coordinated spending limits and achieve unprecedented cost-sharing on polling, research, critical infrastructure, advertising, and direct mail.”
“Today’s decision ensures those efforts will be even further strengthened as the candidate rate on our coordinated television spending stretches our hard dollars further than ever before. Committees have received the lowest unit rate on coordinated spending for nearly five decades, and we will continue to fight the Democrats’ frivolous and partisan attempts to upend that precedent,” NRSC Communications Director Joanna Rodriguez said in a statement.