Federal court halts, for now, Kentucky election finance opinion on school choice measure

(The Center Square) – A federal appeals court Thursday temporarily stopped the Kentucky Registry of Election Finance from taking action against three Republican county committees that want to use funds to support a school choice initiative scheduled to appear on the November ballot.

The ruling by a three-judge panel from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals does not put an end to the case. Rather, the parties will now need to submit briefs for the judges as they consider issuing a broader injunction.

Lawyers for the GOP executive committees in Boone, Hardin and Jessamine counties have two weeks to submit their arguments, and the registry will have two weeks after that to file its response.

In June, party officials from Hardin and Jessamine sought a KREF opinion to determine if they could spend money to promote Amendment 2, which, if passed, would allow the General Assembly to authorize initiatives providing funding for families to send their children to a school of their choice. KREF General Counsel Leslie Saunders responded a month later, stating state law requires party funds to be spent on promoting its candidates.

If they wished to support the amendment, Saunders wrote, then the committees would need to establish a separate political action committee to do so.

The committees filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the registry from enforcing its opinion, but a federal district judge in Frankfort denied the request for an injunction. That led to the appeal to the Sixth Circuit panel, which said the committees were likely to get an injunction based on the arguments.

“Because campaign expenditures are a form of political speech, the Registry’s limitation on those expenditures likely burdens the executive committees’ First Amendment rights,” U.S. Circuit Judge Karen Nelson Moore wrote in the 15-page ruling.

However, the judges conceded their opinion was only preliminary and subject to further consideration.

KREF Executive Director John Steffen told The Center Square in an email after the opinion dropped that the case still needs to be reviewed on its merits.

“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,” he said.

Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman filed an amicus brief with the appellate court last week in support of the GOP committees’ argument. He added the state agency responsible for ensuring compliance with election finance laws misinterpreted state statutes.

In a statement after the ruling, Coleman said the judges upheld the right to free speech, a key tenet of American democracy.

“Now, Kentucky’s political parties can have a full and open debate on the proposed constitutional amendments, and, this November, voters will have the opportunity to chart our Commonwealth’s future at the ballot box,” the attorney general said.