Vice President Kamala Harris appeared on “Saturday Night Live” over the weekend despite the comedy sketch show’s creator recently saying no 2024 presidential candidates would be brought on the show before Election Day.
Harris’s surprise appearance came during SNL’s last episode before Election Day. The vice president played herself as the mirror-image double of Maya Rudolph’s version of herself during the show’s cold open.
“It is nice to see you, Kamala,” Harris told Rudolph. “And I’m just here to remind you, you got this.”
The appearance followed SNL creator Lorne Michaels telling The Hollywood Reporter in a September interview that he didn’t intend to invite any presidential candidates to the show prior to the election.
“You can’t bring the actual people who are running on because of election laws and the equal time provisions,” Michaels said.
“You can’t have the main candidates without having all the candidates, and there are lots of minor candidates that are only on the ballot in, like, three states and that becomes really complicated,” he added.
Brendan Carr, a Republican commissioner for the Federal Communications Commission, seized on Michaels’s comments when claiming this weekend Harris’s appearance violated the FCC’s equal time rule. The rule requires U.S. radio and television broadcast stations to provide equal access to air time to competing political candidates.
“The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct – a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election,” Carr wrote on X Saturday. “Unless the broadcaster offered Equal Time to other qualifying campaigns.”
NBC later filed an equal time notice stating Harris appeared “without charge” on SNL for 1 minute and 30 seconds, according to Carr.
In response to the controversy, NBC gave former President Donald Trump free advertisement time on Sunday, according to The Hollywood Reporter. While NBC did not respond to a request to confirm the report, a video filmed by Trump aired during both the network’s NASCAR coverage and Sunday Night Football postgame show.
The former president shared an advertisement to X Sunday evening which opened with “Hello to our great sports fans.”
Trump last appeared on SNL on Nov. 7, 2015, nearly five months after he announced his candidacy for the 2016 presidential race. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, also joined the show during that election cycle.
The Harris campaign declined to comment when reached by The National News Desk Monday. NBC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.