Republicans are seeking the Supreme Court’s help with elections again.

This time, national GOP senatorial and congressional committees launched an emergency bid to halt a ruling that is poised to benefit Democrats ahead of the midterms.  

The case is about who can get favorable rates for broadcast campaign advertisements in the run-up to elections.

Under federal law, it’s clear that candidates can get those rates, which are called the “lowest unit charge,” or LUC. But the question is whether the same is true for political parties and joint fundraising committees with non-candidate members. The answer is politically significant because Democratic candidates generally raise more money than their committees, and vice versa for Republicans.

The Federal Communications Commission under President Donald Trump took the GOP-friendly position, leading to a court challenge from House candidate Kristen McDonald Rivet of Michigan and Senate candidates Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Jon Ossoff of Georgia and Roy Cooper of North Carolina — all Democrats.

A divided three-judge panel sided with the Democrats, ruling that the LUC requirement and relevant campaign finance laws “are clear that neither political parties nor joint fundraising committees with non-candidate members can be entitled to the LUC.” The decision by two Democratic-appointed judges in the majority came over dissent from a GOP appointee, who said he refused to “neuter a federal agency and seize imaginary jurisdiction only to disfavor the place of political parties in our democratic dialogue and to dampen the vigor of preelection political speech.”

The Republican committees cited that dissent in seeking emergency relief from the high court. In their application, they accused the appellate majority of rewriting the rules for political ads in the middle of an election season. They said broadcast stations have already rescinded favorable rates since the appellate ruling. They urged the high court to lift the lower court ruling immediately, or at least by Friday, when their desired rates are otherwise set to take effect.

Their application went to Chief Justice John Roberts, who fields emergency requests from the lower court in question, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. Roberts can act on his own or refer the matter to the full high court. (He recently acted on his own, for example, in granting temporary relief for the Trump administration’s White House ballroom construction, pending further word from the full court.)

The urgent GOP bid for relief comes as the justices will likely soon be separately called on to decide the legality of the administration’s intended mail-ballot restrictions for the midterms.

The administration is supporting the GOP application in this advertising litigation, telling the high court that “candidates and political parties need immediate relief from the uncertainty created by the Fourth Circuit’s decision on the rates they need to pay for campaign advertising.”

Among the Supreme Court’s late-June rulings was one from the GOP-appointed majority that backed Republicans by striking down campaign finance restrictions. Specifically, the court struck down restrictions on political parties spending on ads with input from the party’s candidate. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority that the coordinated-expenditure limits violated the First Amendment, and the court overturned a 2001 precedent that had upheld those limits.  

In their emergency application in this latest litigation, the GOP committees said the appeals court ruling against them runs afoul of that new Supreme Court precedent.  

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