Eleventh Circuit Revives Catoosa GOP Lawsuit Over Primary Ballot Control
Our chief legal correspondent, Jason Shepherd, is currently on the road and unable to continue his excellent series breaking down the Catoosa County GOP legal battle, so I’ll pick up the baton for now.
If you haven’t been following the saga, the Catoosa County Republican Party refused to allow four candidates to qualify for the GOP primary last year. Local party leaders believed those candidates didn’t reflect the principles of the Republican Party and declined to sign the qualifying affidavits required under their rules. The candidates went to court, and a Catoosa County Superior Court judge ordered the Board of Elections to bypass the party and place the candidates on the Republican ballot anyway.
That sparked a federal lawsuit by the local GOP and its chair, Joanna Hildreth, claiming their First Amendment rights were violated. The district court tossed the case, saying the party had no standing to bring the suit and that their proposed ballot questions (which would have informed primary voters that the candidates were not approved by the party) amounted to government speech, not protected private speech.
But today, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision and sent the case back to the lower court. The panel of judges said the Catoosa GOP does have standing to challenge the forced association with candidates they chose not to qualify. In fact, the court emphasized that a political party has a constitutional right to determine who represents it, even at the county level, and that right includes the ability to exclude candidates based on ideological differences. The fact that Georgia law doesn’t give local parties that discretion was not a reason to dismiss the case and instead was the very basis of the injury.
On the free speech claim, the appellate court said the district judge was too quick to declare the proposed ballot questions “government speech.” The judges pointed out that Georgia law gives parties the authority to submit questions to their voters during the primary and requires election officials to print those questions on the ballot. Whether the Secretary of State’s office had the legal right to reject the questions submitted by the Catoosa GOP is a question that will now get further consideration.
The court did not rule on the merits of either claim. It simply said the plaintiffs had alleged enough to move forward. That’s an important step and a clear signal that the courts are not going to brush off local parties when they raise serious constitutional questions. It also raises serious questions about whether the resolution passed at the recent GAGOP convention banning Brad Raffensperger from running as a Republican will now put Chairman Josh McKoon in an untenable position.
For now, we’re going to refrain from speculating on how this will ultimately turn out or what it might mean for the future of regular people trying to participate in the GAGOP nominating process. I will offer, however, that this is an effort by a group of political elitists who want to silence the voice of the average Republican voter in Georgia. But we’ll keep watching the case as it develops, and Jason will be back with more analysis once he’s back in town.
Stay tuned.
