TPPF litigators Laura Beth Latimer, Chance Weldon, Nathan Seltzer, and Clayton Calvin are wrapping up some of the final Supreme Court drops of the session with an analysis of two major election cases.
First, the team wades into a fascinating statutory interpretation battle in Watson v. Republican National Committee. What does the word “elect” actually mean, and does Election Day end when a ballot is postmarked or when it is received by the government? Then, the crew battles a labyrinth of federal acronyms to break down NRSC v. FEC, a major First Amendment case that asks whether the government can limit how much a political party coordinates spending with its own candidates.
Grab your dictionaries and prepare for a passionate rant on why money actually is speech—it’s an alphabet soup of campaign finance, preemption, and “YOLO textualism”!
In this episode:
— Watson v. RNC (5-4): An unusual cross-ideological majority (Barrett, Roberts, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson) decides whether federal law preempts a Mississippi statute allowing mail-in ballots to be counted up to five days after Election Day. We discuss the difference between casting and receiving a vote and whether pragmatism should ever override textualism.
— NRSC v. FEC (6-3): Do limits on a political party’s coordinated campaign expenditures violate the First Amendment? We break down the realities of campaign finance, quid pro quo corruption vs. prophylactic rules, and why buying poster board for a picket sign proves that money is, in fact, speech.
— The “Tiers of Scrutiny” Drum: Chance beats his favorite drum against arbitrary balancing tests, explaining why “closely drawn review” is just a policy-based word salad that ignores the original meaning of the First Amendment.
— The Alphabet Soup of Federal Law: Why the NRSC, FEC, FECA, and UOCAVA prove that we desperately need to stop using acronyms in legal briefs.