This Supreme Court, with its 6-3 Republican majority, will likely give the Republican Party what it’s asking for. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images The Republican Party is once again asking the Supreme Court to change the rules governing US elections in order to make it easier for GOP candidates to prevail in future elections. And this Court, with its 6-3 Republican majority, will likely give the GOP what it is asking for. National Republican Congressional Committee v. Brown concerns a federal statute that requires broadcast television and radio stations to allow candidates to buy campaign ads at a highly discounted rate. The question in Brown is whether political party committees such as the DNC or the RNC are also entitled to this discounted rate. A federal appeals court determined that they are not, as the relevant statute only extends this rate to “a legally qualified candidate for any public office,” and not to that candidate’s political party. The GOP now wants the justices to give its party committees this discounted rate anyway. If the justices agree, that would give Republicans an advantage in future elections, because the GOP tends to raise more money through its party organizations than Democrats do. While individual Democratic candidates often outraise their Republican opponents, Republican donors tend to be much more generous to party committees than their Democratic counterparts. As of late June, for example, the RNC had nearly $130 million in cash, while the DNC was in debt. A Republican victory in the case would also increase the significance of another win the Supreme Court handed the GOP in June 2025, in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC (2026). Federal law previously placed strict limits on a party organization’s ability to coordinate with candidates on messaging, ad placement, and similar tactical decisions. NRSC abolished many of those limits, thus making money raised by party committees more potent because those committees may now work closely with candidates to plan how that money is spent. Brown, meanwhile, could make any dollar that a party committee spends on ads stretch much further than it otherwise would. The GOP’s argument that federal law allows party committees to buy ads at a discount is not persuasive. Again, the relevant federal statute gives a discount to candidates and not to parties. But that’s unlikely to matter because the GOP’s brief to the Court does make a plausible procedural argument that would allow the justices to wipe away the lower court decision ruling against the Republican Party. If that happens, it would leave the question of whether parties may buy ads at a discount to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which Republicans control. It will be fairly easy, in other words, for the Court’s Republican majority to rule in favor of their political party in Brown, in the likely event that those six justices are inclined to do so. And that means that the RNC’s money advantage over Democratic groups is about to matter a whole lot more. A GOP victory in Brown would augment the party’s recent victory in NRSC Brown is part of a broader Republican Party legal strategy, which seeks to make money donated to the party itself as fungible as possible with money given to individual Republican candidates. The GOP’s recent victory in NRSC is also part of this strategy. Federal law limits the amount of money donors may give directly to candidates — the cap on these donations is currently $3,500. It also restricts how much money donors may give to party committees such as the DNC or the RNC, but that cap is much higher. It is $44,300 per donor per year in the current election cycle. Campaign finance law also used to prevent party committees from coordinating their political spending with individual campaigns — the idea was to prevent big donors from laundering donations that exceed the $3,500 cap on donations to candidates through party committees like the RNC. But, in NRSC, the Republican justices repealed most of the restrictions on coordination between party committees and individual candidates. So the upshot of that decision is that party organizations may still seek donations from wealthy donors that are an order of magnitude larger than what candidates may raise from those same donors. But now, there are far fewer restrictions on these party organizations’ ability to work with candidates to devise a joint strategy for spending their combined funds. But, because party organizations are not themselves candidates, the language of the statute at issue in Brown indicates that these organizations must pay significantly higher rates to run these ads than the campaigns the party hopes to coordinate with. This statute essentially requires broadcast stations to charge their lowest ad rate to candidates. Often, major advertisers buy ads in bulk, and receive a significant discount for doing so. By law, broadcast stations must give the same discount to candidates for public office that they give to advertisers who buy ads at the cheapest rate offered by that station. So, if a local TV station allows Budweiser to buy ads at a 50 percent discount because the beer maker runs hundreds of ads on that station, then it must give this same 50 percent discount to political candidates, even if those candidates only run a handful of ads. The legal term for this discounted rate is the “lowest unit charge” or “LUC rate,” and these discounts can be quite substantial. A somewhat dated report by the Congressional Research Service estimates that bulk ad discounts are as high as 30 percent, while a more recent news article by the congressional newspaper Roll Call estimates that occasional ad buyers may pay “two or three times” as much per ad as an advertiser who secures the best discount. So, the Supreme Court has already given the GOP greater ability to coordinate strategy and tactics with individual campaigns. And now it wants the much-larger donations that party committees can raise from wealthy donors to go even further than they already do. Republicans want Trump’s FCC, and not the courts, to decide who gets the discounted rate The Republican Party’s primary argument in Brown is that two procedural quirks in this case work together to prevent federal courts from enforcing the statute as it is written (although the GOP does also argue that the statute gives party committees the same discounted rate as candidates). Last March, while NRSC was still pending before the justices, Trump’s FCC issued a “Public Notice” declaring that political parties are, in fact, entitled to the discounted ad rates that federal law guarantees to candidates. Four Democratic candidates, including US Senate candidates Sherrod Brown, Roy Cooper, and Jon Ossoff formally asked the FCC to reverse that policy in April, but the FCC sat on their request without acting on it. With the 2026 election looming and no action from the FCC, these candidates then asked the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to intervene in late June, and, in a late August decision, the Fourth Circuit agreed with the Democratic candidates that the FCC’s interpretation of the law governing ad rates is wrong. Republicans, meanwhile, argue that the Fourth Circuit decided this case prematurely. If the Supreme Court agrees with the GOP’s argument, that would mean that the FCC’s interpretation of the statute would go back into effect — and party committees would be allowed to buy ads at a discount, at least during the 2026 election. The Republican Party’s jurisdictional argument is plausible, but far from airtight. While a federal law does permit the Fourth Circuit to review the FCC’s “final orders,” the GOP argues that the FCC’s Public Notice does not count as a final order, and the Fourth Circuit cannot hear this case until after the FCC rules on the Democratic candidates’ April request to reverse the policy announced in that notice. There is some legal support for the Republican Party’s position. Among other things, a different federal appeals court, the DC Circuit, said in a 2013 opinion that a federal agency’s “statements of policy” that do not go through the rigorous rulemaking process that agencies must conduct before they issue a new regulation are typically not subject to judicial review. So that decision cuts in favor of the Republican Party’s position, even though a DC Circuit decision is not binding on the Supreme Court. The Fourth Circuit’s decision in Brown, meanwhile, offers a strong rebuttal to this argument. It points to the FCC’s failure to act on the Democratic candidates’ April request, and it cites a different DC Circuit decision establishing that, “when administrative inaction has precisely the same impact on the rights of the parties as denial of relief,” then a federal court is allowed to intervene. If this rule did not exist, then the GOP-led FCC could effectively prevent courts from hearing Brown forever, simply by refusing to take any action at all on the Democratic candidates’ April filing. In any event, it is safe to say that the question of whether these Democratic candidates must wait until the FCC acts before they can seek relief in federal court is not definitively resolved by prior precedents. Both the Republican Party and the Democratic candidates can cite court decisions that favor their position, and that means that the justices can choose whichever outcome they prefer. The Supreme Court’s Republican majority, moreover, often hands down dubious jurisdictional rulings that benefit Republicans or other conservative causes. Just this week, for example, five of the Republican justices ruled that Trump may build his White House ballroom — even though a federal statute prohibits Trump from doing so. They reached this result by claiming, on far-fetched legal grounds, that federal courts lacked jurisdiction to hear the challenge to Trump’s ballroom in the first place. The Republican Party’s jurisdictional argument in Brown is hardly a slam dunk, but it is much stronger than the argument the Court just used to deny jurisdiction in the ballroom case. So, if the Court’s Republican majority wants to let Republican organizations buy ads at a discounted rate, they’ll probably find it easy to write an opinion that reaches their preferred outcome.