A few days ago, the Florida Secretary of State amended his website to list the Reform Party as a qualified party. Florida now has sixteen qualified parties, all of them eligible to nominate by primary. However, only parties with registration of 5% may have a presidential primary. Also, only parties recognized by the Federal Election Commission as a national committee may nominate for president without a difficult petition.
Here is the list of the parties.
on Wednesday, June 12, all sixteen full-time judges of the Sixth Circuit heard arguments in National Republican Senatorial Committee v Federal Election Commission, 24-3051. The issue is the McCain-Feingold law that limits how much money parties can spend on their own nominees, in federal elections. The U.S. Supreme Court had upheld that law in the past, as applied to Instances when the parties directly coordinate with their own nominees. But the vote was 5-4. The Republican Party’s Senatorial campaign committee filed a new lawsuit in 2022, hoping that eventually the case will reach the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court will modify or reverse its earlier ruling.
The case was before all full-time judges of the Sixth Circuit, because the case was filed in Ohio and the McCain-Feingold law says challenges to the law will be heard first in a court of appeals, with all judges participating. These en banc hearings are rare, because they require so much judicial time and effort.
Here is a story about the hearing.
On June 13, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its opinion in Food & Drug Administration v Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, 23-235. Here is the opinion. It says that plaintiffs do not have standing to challenge an FDA decision to expand access to certain medications involving abortion.
Although this is not an election law case, it will affect election law, as Professor Derek Muller noted at electionlawblog. The decision says that just because a group must spend money if some administrative decision is not reversed, that doesn’t mean the challenger to the administration decision has standing. In Nevada, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is suing in federal court over the state’s determination that vice-presidential candidates must be listed on the independent presidential petition. A Democratic Party-allied interest group is trying to intervene in the case against Kennedy, on the grounds that if Kennedy gets on the ballot, the interest group will need to spend more money campaigning for President Joe Biden.
But the U.S. Supreme Court said in FDA v AHM, “The medical associations respond that under Hevens Realty Corp. v Coleman, standing exists when an organization diverts its resources in response to a defendant’s actions. That is incorrect. Indeed, that theory would mean that all the organizations in America would have standing to challenge almost every federal policy that they dislike, provided they spend a single dollar opposing those policies. Havens does not support such an expansive theory of standing.
Democratic Party groups this year alone have taken legal action to injure the ballot access of various minor party and independent candidates in Arizona, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, and perhaps some other states.
Richard Winger will have more on this case in the near future.
The Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Campaign filed a Complaint with the Federal Election Commission stating that this criterion that would be used to include Joe Biden and Donald Trump in a Thursday, June 27 debate that might exclude RFK, Jr. could not legally be employed without triggering illegal corporate contributions to the Biden and Trump Campaigns. It appears that the FEC agrees.
