Lawsuits
During the 2000 election, the CPD stipulated that candidates would only be invited to debate if they had a 15% support level across five national polls. Ralph Nader, a presidential candidate who was not allowed to debate because of this rule, believed that the regulation was created to stifle the views of third party candidates by keeping them off the televised debates. Nader brought a lawsuit against them in a federal court, on the basis that corporate contributions violate the Federal Election Campaign Act. After a series of FEC actions and lower court decisions, the D.C. Circuit Court ultimately ruled in 2005 that because Congress vested discretionary power in the FEC (meaning that an FEC action would have to rise to the level of arbitrary and capricious to be challenged), the court would not overrule the FEC's determinations that "found that the third-party challengers had failed to provide 'evidence that the CPD is controlled by the DNC or the RNC,'" and that the CPD provided sufficient rationale for barring third party candidates from entering the debates as audience members out of fear they might have disrupted the live debates in protest over having been excluded as debate particpants.
On September 21, 2012, Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson filed an anti-trust lawsuit against CPD, the RNC and the DNC in D.C. Circuit Court citing the Sherman Act and claiming "restraint of trade" for denying competition to, for example, potentially receive the $400,000 annual presidential salary. Although the complaint recounts the history of CPD formation, it omits any mention of either the Nader/Hagelin 2000 lawsuit or the FEC. The Johnson complaint asks "for injunctive relief by temporary restraining order ... by enjoining defendants ... from conducting presidential debates unless all constitutionally-eligible candidates are included whose names will appear on the ballots in states whose cumulative total of electoral college votes is 270 or more."
On October 22, 2012, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein announced a lawsuit against CPD claiming, "that the CPD, Democratic National Committee, and Republican National Committee, together with the Federal Election Commission and Lynn University, had deprived her of her constitutional rights to due process, equal protection, and free speech, as well as her statutorily protected civil rights."
Read more about this topic: Commission On Presidential Debates