Supreme Court was right to halt the 4th Circuit's deadline
By Adele Rutherford · Reporting from Atlanta ·
The Supreme Court correctly rebuked the 4th Circuit for meddling in agency timing, even as the underlying Republican rule on broadcast campaign ad rates remains a transparent shortcut.
The unreasoned shortcut
We live in a time when every branch of government treats procedure as an obstacle to be vaulted rather than a boundary to be honored. The Federal Communications Commission under Republican control demonstrated this clearly on March 30. It announced that broadcasters must extend lower rates to political parties and their joint fundraising committees, according to reporting from the Los Angeles Times. The agency did not explain the basis for the change and refused to hold a commission hearing. Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on the FCC, stated that the public should not have sweeping election-year rule changes forced on them in the dark, on the eve of the election, without a single opportunity for public input. That rule change granted political parties and their fundraising committees lower rates for broadcast campaign ads. Federal law entitles a legally qualified candidate running for election to a lower unit charge for campaign ads in the 60 days prior to an election. The Campaign Legal Center stated the rule change was contrary to the text and purpose of the federal statute and would effectively grant super PACs an advertising discount. Yet the substantive merits of that administrative fiat are not the only thing at stake. Procedure is the skeleton of the law. When you break it to win today, you leave nothing to lean on tomorrow.
The judicial short circuit
The fight moved swiftly to the courts, where the temptation to bypass administrative exhaustion proved too strong for the judiciary to resist, as detailed in SCOTUSblog dispatches. In April, Democratic Senate candidates Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Jon Ossoff of Georgia, and Roy Cooper of North Carolina objected to the FCC rule change and requested a review. They argued the FCC lacked authority to extend lower ad rates to fundraising committees. The U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia ruled for the Democrats. Judge Robert B. King stated that any chaos was the FCC's fault, not theirs, and that the FCC had endeavored to create from whole cloth a new rule entirely outside the purview of judicial review. Judges Robert King and James Wynn wrote that if allowed to continue dragging its feet, the FCC will have evaded meaningful judicial review. The 4th Circuit majority established an Oct. 9 deadline for the FCC to resolve the application. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III dissented, calling it a direct affront to the Supreme Court. Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer told the Supreme Court that the 4th Circuit had seriously erred in trying to short-circuit the commission's deliberations. The 4th Circuit tried to force an independent agency to march to a judicial drumbeat under an impossible deadline. That is not how administrative law works, and it is not how the separation of powers survives.
Chevron deference in reverse
Both cases center on the degree of deference the judiciary must grant to a government agency's interpretation of a statute. This dynamic shares its exact mechanism with Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., where courts surrendered their own independent judgment to executive agencies under the guise of statutory ambiguity. When the left held the administrative state, it demanded absolute deference to agency discretion, treating judicial intervention as partisan meddling. Now that the right holds the administrative levers, we see the same demand for insulation from judicial oversight, paired with the same casual disregard for notice and comment. On Oct. 14, the Supreme Court granted a fast-track appeal from the Trump administration and the National Republican Congressional Committee. It upheld the use of the rule for the midterm election in an unsigned opinion. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson voted to deny the administration's appeal, with Jackson dissenting from an earlier order as well. In its unsigned opinion, the high court held that the Communications Act requires the commission to act on every application it receives, but does not obligate the commission to act within a particular timeframe. The court reasoned that the 4th Circuit's order would cause irreparable harm by requiring the agency to triage its ongoing deliberation process on an extremely expedited timeline. The court rightly checked a lower court that sought to micromanage an agency's docket on the eve of an election.
The cost of procedural shortcuts
The Republican committees and the administration achieved their immediate goal, as reported by MS NOW. Their victory allowed political parties and joint fundraising committees to continue receiving favorable advertising rates before the election, shielding their preferred spending advantage from timely judicial check. Democratic candidates fighting them stated they were up for election in just over three weeks. They were experiencing the exact deluge of party spending at the candidate rate that Republican committees promised to unleash to obliterate them. That political pain is real, but the temptation to let appellate judges rewrite agency schedules to fix it is a trap. If we concede that a federal appeals court can manufacture a deadline to force an agency hand before an election, we validate the exact tool our opponents will use the moment power changes hands. The Supreme Court got the jurisdictional question right by halting the 4th Circuit's judicial overreach, even if the underlying FCC rule remains a transparent exercise in election-year administrative engineering. We must judge the process by whether its rules can be lived under when the other side holds the pen, and by that measure, the justices preserved the structural wall between agency discretion and judicial impatience.