Election 2024 /

WSJ: CNN Blackballs Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It ignores Federal Election Commission rules in excluding him from the presidential debate.

  |   By Polling+ Staff

(Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

CNN Blackballs Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

It ignores Federal Election Commission rules in excluding him from the presidential debate.

A conservative sticks up for RFK Jr.

The National Review’s John Fund headlines this in his old haunt, the Op-Ed pages of the Wall Street Journal:

“CNN announced Thursday that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. failed to qualify for next week’s presidential debate. To do so, he would have had to reach 15% support in four national polls (he managed only three) and secure ballot access in states with at least 270 electoral votes, enough to win the presidency.

There’s reason to think these requirements were designed to accommodate the wishes of the major parties, which wanted RFK Jr. excluded. In May a Trump official told the Washington Post a CNN producer had promised that “RFK will not be on the stage.” A Biden adviser told Axios: “Our criteria for a one-to-one debate was made clear publicly, it was made clear to CNN and they understood our position when we accepted their offer.” CNN has declined to answer media inquiries on details of its negotiations.

The timing of the debate—nearly three months earlier than any previous general-election debate—made it impossible for Mr. Kennedy to meet the ballot-access criteria. CNN’s requirement would have excludedRoss Perot, who participated in the 1992 debates, because he was on the ballot in states with only 119 electoral votes as of mid-June that year. Perot had completed the process in many more states, but state election offices didn’t verify all the signatures until mid-September, according to Richard Winger, editor of Ballot Access News.

Mr. Winger says CNN’s ballot-access requirement is “irrational” because Mr. Kennedy has filed signatures in states with 310 electoral votes and is almost certain to make all 50 state ballots. Mr. Winger adds: “Actually, Trump and Biden aren’t currently on any state ballots because they haven’t even been nominated yet.”

Mr. Kennedy has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission arguing that the debate violates a regulation requiring organizations that host debates among candidates for federal office to use “pre-established” and “objective” criteria to determine candidate participation. Failure to use objective criteria renders the debate a campaign contribution, subject to strict donation limits. Mr. Kennedy has quipped that “CNN is at risk of prosecution, as happened to Michael Cohen, for knowingly and willfully violating campaign finance laws.”

CNN contends that Messrs. Biden and Trump are their parties’ “presumptive nominees.” The now-sidelined Commission on Presidential Debates, which ran every general-election presidential debate between 1988 and 2020, disagrees: “Until the conventions take place, we don’t know who the official nominees will be.”

Bradley Smith, a former FEC chairman, says that while “technically, Kennedy’s complaint looks like an issue,” the FEC “would likely say that as a matter of prosecutorial discretion, they wouldn’t pursue this.” The FEC’s rule has never been tested in court, where it would face a strong argument that it is unconstitutional, at least as applied to news organizations.

In the spirit of transparency and fairness, CNN should answer questions about how far it stretched to accommodate the wishes of the major parties. As Mr. Smith concludes: “There is an Iron Rule of Third Parties: Third parties always get screwed.”

In fact, if third parties play a role in a presidential election at all it is to take votes from one of the two major parties, which in turn elects the other one. From Jill Stein in 2016 to Ross Perot in 1992 to George Wallace in 1968 and on back, the story is always the same.