UPDATE: FEC to write a “WRTL rule”
on Jul 18, 2007 at 7:39 pm
UPDATE Thursday p.m.
The Federal Elections Commission on Thursday announced that it will write a new rule to “incorporate the Supreme Court decision [in the WRTL case} into the Commission’s Regulations.” FEC Chairman Robert Lenhard was quoted as saying that the Commission “intends to make clear how we are interpreting this exemption before mid-December, when the electioneering communication timeframes for the 2008 campaign will begin.. We believe it is critical to have a clear rule in place in time for the Presidential primaries and caucuses in early 2008.” A notice of proposed rulemaking will be prepared next month, the FEC said. A news release describing the plan can be found here.
UPDATE Thursday a.m.
Continuing to move to nail down a Supreme Court victory on broadcasting ads during political seasons, lawyers for Wisconsin Right to Life on Wednesday asked the Federal Election Commission to write into its rules the definition of protected ads that the Supreme Court laid down in FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life. The petition for rulemaking can be found here.
The major test case on the right to broadcast ads during election season appears to be at its end, after the Federal Election Commission and four members of Congress joined in a plea to find the ads at issue to be constitutionally protected. In a joint motion filed Wednesday, Wisconsin Right to Life, an advocacy group that opposes abortion, along with the FEC and the lawmakers urged a three-judge U.S. District Court to rule that a 2006 ad campaign could not be banned under the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act’s “electioneering communications” ban. That ban applies to ads during election periods when the ad names an individual then running for federal office.
The Supreme Court, in FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, ruled on June 25 that three ads that WRTL had wanted to run in 2004 were protected by the First Amendment. The Court laid down a new, more relaxed standard for constitutional protection for ads the FEC thought were covered by BCRA’s ban. The Court sent the case back to District Court to rule on a separate ad campaign, planned for 2006. That was the ad that was at issue in the joint motion.
The joint motion can be found here, and a proposed order is here.
An earlier post describing the advocacy group’s legal maneuver following the Supreme Court decision can be found here. As part of the joint motion, the parties agreed that the District Court should deny WRTL’s requests for different forms of legal relief in the case.
