The Supreme Court just wrapped up another term in which the Republican-appointed majority sided with conservatives in First Amendment appeals. Next term’s docket is shaping up to continue that trend.
On Monday, the court agreed to hear an appeal from Republicans challenging campaign finance restrictions. The challenge comes from the National Republican Senatorial Committee and others affiliated with the GOP, represented by Noel Francisco, a former U.S. solicitor general during the first Trump administration. The current Trump administration agrees that limiting how much political parties can spend on campaigns in coordination with candidates violates the First Amendment. It likewise urged the justices to take up the issue.
That rare agreement between parties would otherwise leave the restrictions undefended. In those situations, the court will sometimes appoint a disinterested lawyer who isn’t involved in the case to represent an undefended or abandoned view.
But represented by Marc Elias, the Democratic National Committee and related groups asked the justices for permission to intervene, which the court granted in its order taking the case. “The Solicitor General’s reversal leaves the 50-year-old limitation on coordinated spending by political parties, and this Court’s 24-year-old precedent upholding it, entirely undefended before the Court,” Elias wrote in his successful intervention motion.
The case, called National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, will be argued sometime in the court’s next term, which begins in October. It takes four justices to grant review of an appeal.
NRSC v. FEC joins cases already on next term’s docket brought by conservatives citing the First Amendment, which is generally a winning strategy at the Roberts Court.
A couple of weeks ago, the court agreed to review an appeal from the conservative Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents an anti-abortion group that was investigated by state authorities for potentially misleading donors and potential clients about the health services it provides. The group wants to press a First Amendment claim against turning over donor information and sought to pursue its claim in federal court. The high court is also set to hear another ADF free speech case next term, involving the constitutionality of Colorado’s ban on so-called conversion therapy to try to change a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Both ADF cases, along with the new election-related case, could be among the decisions we’re waiting on this time next year, when the justices hand down some of their most contentious and divided rulings at the end of June each term. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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