Federal Appeals Court Dismisses Challenge To Commission On Presidential Debates

A Federal Appeals Court in Washington, D.C. has upheld a decision dismissing a lawsuit filed by Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, respectively the nominees of the Libertarian and Green parties in both 2012 and 2016, against the Commission on Presidential Debates:

Third-party candidates Gary Johnson’s and Jill Stein’s rights were not violated when they were excluded from presidential debates during the 2012 campaign, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday.

The pair, who also ran for the White House in 2016 as the nominees of the Libertarian and Green parties, claimed their First Amendment rights had been violated, alleging that their participation was denied “because of hostility towards their political viewpoints.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected their argument, however.

“Every four years, we suffer through the celebration of democracy (and national nightmare) that is a presidential election. And, in the end, one person is selected to occupy our nation’s highest office,” wrote Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a George W. Bush appointee who announced she would be retiring at the end of August, in the majority decision. “But in every hard-fought presidential election there are losers. And, with quadrennial regularity, those losers turn to the courts.”The Johnson and Stein campaigns also brought antitrust claims into the mix, saying that the two-party system and overall requirements for participation in presidential and vice presidential debates constituted a political monopoly of sorts.

Challenges such as this are not unusual, of course. Just as Presidential debates are a quadrennial tradition in the United States, so too are the complaints of third-party candidates and others who are excluded from debates at either the primary or general election stage

Read more at Outside the Beltway