The U.S. Supreme Court granted an emergency GOP appeal on Friday, halting a lower-court ruling and allowing political parties to access discounted TV ad rates ahead of the midterm elections.
The decision comes on the heels of a June Supreme Court ruling that removed limits on parties spending money in coordination with candidates. It was viewed as a boon to the GOP because the national party has a sizable cash advantage, and access to cheaper ad rates could boost that edge. Among Democrats, meanwhile, some individual candidates have sizable fundraising advantages over their Republican opponents. The Trump administration supported the emergency appeal from GOP campaign arms, and the Justice Department argued that the FCC guidance wouldn’t harm the Democratic candidates who sued because the rule is applied universally.
Emergency GOP Appeal Overturns Lower-Court Ad Pricing Restrictions
The legal fight centers on federal law granting deep ad discounts to political candidates in the run-up to an election. In March, the Federal Communications Commission’s Media Bureau said certain party-coordinated ads are entitled to those prices as well, extending that benefit to 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.
Four Democrats challenged the finding in court: 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. They won a victory from a divided panel of the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that the law clearly limited the lower rate benefit only to candidates. Those lower rates, according to court documents, were set to take effect on Friday.
Following the appeals court ruling, broadcasters began charging higher rates and upending planned budgets. The National Republican Congressional Committee and National Republican Senatorial Committee then asked the Supreme Court to intervene with an emergency appeal, telling the high court that they had already budgeted tens of millions of dollars
in advertising based on the FCC guidance. The campaign arm for House and Senate Republicans intervened to defend the FCC’s decision. A majority of the Supreme Court justices agreed that the lower court had acted too soon with the order that differed from judges around the country, concluding that the challenge to the guidance was premature.
First Amendment Rights and Financial Stakes in the Midterm Elections
In an unsigned opinion, the high court emphasized that forcing party committees to pay standard commercial rates would cause irreparable harm by curtailing their ability to communicate with voters. The court noted that current and future ad rescissions would force committees to spend significantly more for advertising space, hampering their efforts in the critical weeks before the midterms.
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 Supreme Court order states. 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.
Supreme Court, unsigned opinion
One justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, publicly dissented from the unsigned order, writing that the court likely didn’t have to wait until an internal FCC review was done. The decision halts the appeals court ruling while the Republican committees file a fuller appeal.
Broader Political Landscape and Party Financial Advantages
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, and the court ruled that those caps violated the First Amendment.
The decision will primarily benefit Republicans, who generally raise more money through party committees than Democrats. With the appeals court ruling now paused by the emergency order, the high court’s action is the latest election-related appeal to come before the justices ahead of the pivotal November contests.
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