Supreme Court backs Republican request to lower TV ad rates
By John Fritze, CNN
(CNN) — The Supreme Court on Friday endorsed a request from Republican campaign groups that want to buy discounted TV advertising for this year’s midterms, the latest in a series of emergency rulings from the high court benefiting the GOP.
The decision effectively upholds guidance issued by the Federal Communications Commission in March that allowed the campaign arms of House and Senate Republicans to pay lower ad rates that were previously reserved only for candidates.
The court’s order will primarily benefit Republicans, who generally raise more money through party committees than Democrats.
Over the dissent of liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court said that the challenge to the guidance was premature. The GOP groups had said that broadcasters were rescinding the cheaper ad rates based on a lower court’s decision blocking the guidance.
“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 court wrote in an unsigned opinion. “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.”
Under federal law, candidates are entitled to deeply discounted ad rates in the run up to an election. Guidance this year from the FCC extended that benefit to other campaign entities, like the National Republican Senatorial Committee, that run TV ads on behalf of candidates across the country. Both Republicans and Democrats have long made use of those groups.
The Republican groups told the Supreme Court in their emergency appeal that they had already budgeted “tens of millions of dollars” in advertising based on the FCC guidance. A divided 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the law clearly limited the lower rate benefit only to candidates. Those lower rates, according to court documents, are set to take effect on Friday.
The Trump administration, eager to keep Republican control of Congress, supported the GOP groups at the Supreme Court. The Justice Department argued that the FCC guidance wouldn’t harm the Democratic candidates who sued because the rule is applied universally.
Four Democratic candidates sued over the FCC’s decision: Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet of Michigan, former Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, and former Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina. The campaign arm for House and Senate Republicans intervened to defend the FCC’s decision.
The ad rates case is closely tied to another the Supreme Court decided this summer. In that case, the court’s 6-3 conservative majority rolled back longstanding limits on how much political parties may coordinate with federal candidates. Since the 1970s, political party committees were capped at how much money they could spend in coordination with a campaign. The court ruled that those caps violated the First Amendment.
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