Three Wins in Twelve Days, None on the Merits. Every Shield Was an Agency Process the Agency Had Not Finished.

On September 4, the first day of the lowest-unit-charge window for November 3, the Supreme Court stayed the Fourth Circuit in NRCC v. Brown and reinstated the FCC Media Bureau's March notice letting party committees buy coordinated ads at the cheapest rate a station charges anyone. The stated reason was jurisdictional: four Democratic candidates had an application for review still pending at the Commission, so the appeals court likely could not act. Twelve days earlier the same Court stayed the USPS ballot injunction because the final rule was supposedly still hypothetical, the sequence in entry #46. The day before, the FCC told a district judge the Hobbs Act barred it from hearing Disney's First Amendment case even with no final order, entry #44. Three government wins, zero merits rulings, and in every one the thing that stripped the court of power was an administrative process the agency had not completed and controls the pace of. Two of the three run through the same Commission — the one holding eight ABC licenses in an early renewal it hadn't ordered on anyone in fifty years, chaired by the man the president told to punish an anchor by name. The money is not symmetrical either: the RNC and its two congressional committees are far richer than their counterparts, and in June the Court already freed parties to coordinate unlimited spending. Every outlet ran the GOP win. None ran the argument that won three times.