KY county parties can advocate on constitutional amendments for now, court says
The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit found that some of Kentucky’s election finance regulations blocking county parties from advocating for or against constitutional amendments violate the constitution.
County parties in Kentucky are now, due to a temporary injunction penned by a three-judge panel and published on Thursday, allowed to weigh in and advocate for or against Amendment 2.
The measure will appear on the November ballot, and, if passed, would allow taxpayer funds to help pay for nonpublic K-12 education and charter schools.
Though the politics of the amendment do not technically fall along partisan lines, the state’s highest-elected Republicans – including legislative leadership and statewide elected officials – all support it while Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear and Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman are fierce opponents.
The vote is expected to be the most contentious statewide race this year, as there are no elections for statewide office and Kentucky’s six members of Congress are either running unopposed or in districts not considered competitive by the Cook Political Report.
Allies of public schools and teachers unions have already kicked off a statewide tour speaking out against the amendment. Meanwhile, the libertarian-leaning organization Americans For Prosperity (founded by the Koch Brothers, two entrepreneurs who were some the party’s most influential megadonors) is leading the charge to support the amendment.
A political action committee associated with Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY, is expected to air a television ad supporting the amendment this week.
The legal back-and-forth over whether county parties could weigh in on the amendment began in June when Republican parties in Hardin and Jessamine counties sought an advisory opinion from the Kentucky Registry of Election Finance (KREF). The registry said that county parties could not do so, as amendments were not partisan in nature in the same way that candidates are and weren’t expressly allowed in the latest regulation.
The Boone County Republican Party later joined the other county GOP chapters in a lawsuit against the registry’s opinion. Republican Attorney General Russell Coleman also submitted an amicus brief in support of the parties’ lawsuit.
Initially, US District Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove denied the parties’ request to grant a preliminary injunction on enforcement of the regulation. In writing the opinion for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Karen Nelson Moore said that the KREF regulation burdened the parties’ speech rights under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
“In the realm of First Amendment rights, few are more central than the right to express opinions on electoral questions and the qualifications of political candidates,” Moore wrote.
Though the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has already weighed in on the matter of an injunction, the merits of the case are still pending in district court, said registry Executive Director John Steffen
“As the case has yet to actually be heard on its merits, I expect we will wait and see how the lower courts rule on the merits of the case rather than be overly concerned about the granting of a preliminary injunction. In the meantime, the Registry remains certain that it properly applied the law as it is written to the facts that were presented when it opined on the underlying question in July,” Steffen wrote.
