Supreme Court Grants Party Committees Access to Cheaper Ad Rates

The Supreme Court delivered Republicans their latest win on Friday, putting on hold an appeals court ruling that would have effectively barred political party committees from taking advantage of the same discounted TV ad rates granted to candidates.

In an unsigned order, the court wrote that the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee had demonstrated that “they will likely suffer irreparable harm” if the lower-court ruling wasn’t blocked, because “broadcasters are already rescinding favorable rates.”

“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 order reads. Only one member of the court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented from the order.

The order stems from a Federal Communications Commission policy announced in March that gave certain party-coordinated ads access to the more favorable rates given to candidates around elections. That policy was invalidated by a panel of the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of appeals.

The NRSC and NRCC – with the support of the Trump administration – asked the Supreme Court to stay the lower court’s ruling, arguing that the higher ad rates were disrupting their media budgeting and planning. A group of Democratic candidates had argued in favor of limiting the lower rates to just candidates.

The Supreme Court’s decision on Friday comes just over two months after the justices struck down decades-old limits on coordinated party expenditures, opening the floodgates for political parties to spend unlimited sums of money in direct coordination with individual candidates.

The ruling in that case – NRSC v. Federal Election Commission – was heralded by Republicans, who argued that the coordinated spending limits effectively curtailed their free speech rights. Even so, the ruling was largely seen as a boon to Republicans, whose party committees have over $100 million more in their accounts than their Democratic counterparts.