We’re Hiring!
Policy Analyst – Institute for Free Speech – Washington, DC
The Institute for Free Speech is searching for a dynamic, detail-oriented, and driven Policy Analyst with strong writing and critical thinking skills to assist with the development and dissemination of policy in support of the Institute’s mission to promote and defend our First Amendment rights to free political speech, press, assembly, and petition. The Policy Analyst will have the opportunity to contribute significantly to the Institute’s expanding body of work championing First Amendment speech freedoms. This role will be based at IFS’s headquarters in the Washington, D.C. area.
[You can learn more about this role and apply for the position here.]
In the News
Daily Caller: Filings Show Some Dems Took Corporate Pac Money After Vowing Not To
By Whitney Tipton
Some Democratic congressional candidates broke their promise not to accept donations from corporate PACs, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
Approximately 56 congressional candidates vowed not to accept corporate political action committee money, the campaign finance website OpenSecrets.org reported Thursday.
The gesture of candidates foregoing corporate PAC dollars may be viewed as more symbolic than anything due to the low dollar thresholds and tight regulations governing corporate PACs, according to Institute for Free Speech research fellow Joseph Albanese in 2018.
Corporate PACs do not receive money from the actual corporations they represent. The money comes from its employees…
The majority of the candidates tracked by OpenSecrets, which the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics runs, did not take any donations from corporate PACs, according to first quarter FEC filings. Researches noted 10 exceptions: …
The Courts
CNN: Texas has a law that says contractors can’t boycott Israel. But a federal judge just blocked it
By Joe Sterling
A federal court struck down a Texas law requiring government contractors to certify they are not engaged in boycotts of Israel.
U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman granted preliminary injunctions on Thursday night and cited several rulings to buttress his conclusion that state law HB 89 is unconstitutional.
“At the heart of the First Amendment lies the principle that each person should decide for him or herself the ideas and beliefs deserving of expression, consideration, and adherence. Our political system and cultural life rest upon this ideal,” Pitman said in his opinion.
“The purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular[,]” is “to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation — and their ideas from suppression — at the hands of an intolerant society.”
Pitman denied the state’s motion to dismiss two lawsuits and temporarily blocked the state from enforcing the two-year-old law.
“The statute threatens ‘to suppress unpopular ideas'” and “manipulate the public debate through coercion rather than persuasion,'” Pitman said, citing a previous ruling. “This the First Amendment does not allow.”
The office of state Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a statement saying it looks forward to “defending this law on appeal.” …
Pitman’s conclusion says that Texas says it is “far from alone” in its move to “enact” law against BDS, with 25 states passing similar legislation or issuing executive orders restricting boycotts of Israel and with only a handful of legislators voting against HB 89.
“Texas touts these numbers as the statute’s strength. They are, rather, its weakness,” Pitman said, citing a case that says. “if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
First Amendment
San Antonio Express-News: S.A. and Chick-fil-A shows why free speech matters
By Daniel Ortner
The foundations of freedom of speech are under relentless assault. A case in point: the San Antonio City Council recently voted to exclude Chick-fil-A from the city’s airport because the restaurant chain’s Christian owners have donated to organizations that champion the belief that marriage is between a man and a woman. And last week the council narrowly rejected a proposal to reconsider its decision.
Such censorship is blatantly unconstitutional. But this incident is symptomatic of deeper problems. Many people believe they have the absolute truth with regard to issues of morality, sexuality, religion or politics, and that those who disagree are evil and must be censored or excluded. Similarly, many see people as fragile and argue that offensive speech is violence.
Hence, the San Antonio City Council’s fear that the mere sight of a Chick-fil-A would make LGBTQ+ individuals feel unwelcome. This outlook corrodes our free speech foundations and should be rejected by all those who value the First Amendment…
[W]hile we can hold fervent convictions on all manner of issues, we should not be so certain of our convictions that we would silence others. Instead, we make room even for the expression of ideas we hate. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed this with timeless eloquence: “Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power. … But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe … that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas.”
Roll Call: Facebook feud: GOP Rep. Peter King, faces lawsuit threat over blocking constituents
By Emily Kopp
The Republican congressman has blocked as many as 70 people from his “Congressman Peter King” Facebook page, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union.
The bans infringe on the posters’ First Amendment rights, the civil rights organization said. Attorneys for the New York affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union are prepping a lawsuit, and warned they will move forward against King if he does not unblock them.
“Like ejecting them from that town hall, banning users from your Facebook page stifles their ability to weigh in on your work on their behalf,” the organization said in a letter to King. “It limits their participation in our democratic process, striking at the heart of the First Amendment’s guarantee.” …
King defended scrubbing the page by saying it is operated and promoted by his campaign committee, not his taxpayer-funded office.
“I’m on 100 percent solid legal ground. That Facebook account is political. It is paid for by my campaign committee. It’s the same as having people write negative comments on a campaign brochure and sending that out,” King said in an interview with Newsday. “They can get their own Facebook account and attack me, rather than me paying for it.”
The New York Civil Liberties Union argues that the congressman still has an obligation to keep the page open to critical posts, since the page includes trappings signaling his status as a member of Congress.
“Having reaped the benefits of the page’s official status, you cannot now ignore those benefits to avoid your obligations under the Constitution,” the organization wrote.
FEC
Center for Public Integrity: For Federal Election Commission, No Quick Action On Mueller Report Findings
By Dave Levinthal
The Federal Election Commission’s four remaining commissioners agree on this much: foreign entities who influence U.S. elections are bad.
What they can’t agree on: the role the FEC should play in combating such influence, particularly given the Mueller report’s findings of sustained Russian meddling during Election 2016.
“This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for our democracy,” said FEC Chairwoman Ellen Weintraub, a Democrat, at a meeting today at the agency’s headquarters.
Weintraub advocated for the “strongest actions that we can take” on Mueller report findings that are “squarely” in the FEC’s jurisdiction.
Commissioner Caroline Hunter, a Republican, declared foreign infiltration of U.S. elections “not acceptable.” But she wondered aloud what steps the FEC could or should take to defend against it.
“I would hate to give any member of the public false hope – our jurisdiction is limited,” Hunter said…
Hunter asked Weintraub what elements of the Mueller report she thought fell within the FEC’s purview.
“I’m not going to through the report page by page with you,” Weintraub replied, then added she hopes all commissioners could work in a “cooperative spirit” to find common ground.
The commissioners agreed to seek the advice of “outside experts” and continue studying the Mueller reports findings. Weintraub noted that key staffers have already scoured the report. “This is the beginning of a discussion,” not an end, Weintraub said.
Online Speech Platforms
By Jessica Guynn
Black activists say hate speech policies and content moderation systems formulated by a company built by and dominated by white men fail the very people Facebook claims it’s trying to protect. Not only are the voices of marginalized groups disproportionately stifled, Facebook rarely takes action on repeated reports of racial slurs, violent threats and harassment campaigns targeting black users, they say.
Many of these users now think twice before posting updates on Facebook or they limit how widely their posts are shared. Yet few can afford to leave the single-largest and most powerful social media platform for sharing information and creating community.
So to avoid being flagged, they use digital slang such as “wypipo,” emojis or hashtags to elude Facebook’s computer algorithms and content moderators. They operate under aliases and maintain back-up accounts to avoid losing content and access to their community. And they’ve developed a buddy system to alert friends and followers when a fellow black activist has been sent to Facebook jail, sharing the news of the suspension and the posts that put them there.
They call it getting “Zucked” and black activists say these bans have serious repercussions, not just cutting people off from their friends and family for hours, days or weeks at a time, but often from the Facebook pages they operate for their small businesses and nonprofits…
For years, Facebook was widely celebrated as a platform that empowered people to bypass mainstream media or oppressive governments to directly tell their story. Now, in the eyes of some, it has assumed the role of censor.
With more than a quarter of the world’s population on Facebook, the social media giant says it’s wrestling with its unprecedented power to judge what speech is hateful.
Wall Street Journal: Fear Mark Zuckerberg’s Illiberal Impulses
By Kevin D. Williamson
Facebook has made it known that it would find it easier to operate under a single, international regulatory regime. “We need a more standardized approach,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in March, calling for new regulation aimed vaguely at “protecting society” from “harmful content.” …
Facebook already is working with European governments to craft a regulatory regime it can live with. That’s troubling. Freedom House reports that there is “no official censorship” in Austria, even as it admits that some speech, notably pro-Nazi political speech, is prohibited by law, which is the definition of official censorship. In Austria, possession of banned books can be punished with prison sentences of up to 20 years. There are similar laws in Germany and elsewhere, prohibiting not only neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic communications but also radical left-wing activism of certain kinds.
As a practical matter, Facebook’s cooperation with continental regulators suggests the eventual standard governing speech restrictions on tech platforms will reflect more-restrictive European practice rather than more-liberal American practice, for much the same reason that California’s relatively stringent automotive emissions standards act as an effectively national standard: Corporations generally prefer standardization and homogenization where they are economical.
We should be clear about regulatory standardization and homogenization would mean: Official censorship by governments abroad, proxy censorship by business interests at home, and doublespeak on all sides.
Fundraising
Center for Responsive Politics: Corporate cash leaking into Democratic campaigns despite “no-corporate-PAC” pledge
By Camille Erickson
Many of the candidates on board the “no-corporate-PAC” train still welcome money from cooperatives or trade associations, even if they have ties to big business. The Center for Responsive Politics considers trade association PACs and cooperative PACs to be “business PACs” given the dues they receive from big businesses with a stake in influential industries…
“The decision by so many candidates to refuse corporate PAC money changed the conversation in Washington and led directly to the House passing the most sweeping package of democracy reforms since Watergate,” said Patrick Burgwinkle, End Citizens United communications director, referring to the Democrats’ HR 1, an extensive reform bill meant in part to reduce the influence of money in politics.
But a deeper dive into candidates’ filings uncovers the ways money from corporations and big business can still trickle into progressive campaigns.
“I won’t take money from the banker, the realtors or the hotel, but I will take money from their trade association? That’s hypocrisy,” said Dr. Steven Billet, director of the legislative affairs program at George Washington University. “The money in those organizations comes from the bankers and the realtors.” …
Several candidates also accepted contributions from leadership PACs, committees established by politicians that are funded in part by corporate PAC contributions.These loopholes allow corporate money to leak into these progressive campaigns, even if candidates take a “no-corporate-PAC” pledge, Billet said.
Roll Call: Mark Kelly’s fundraising highlights limits of ‘no corporate PAC’ pledge
By Bridget Bowman
When he launched his campaign for Senate, Arizona Democrat and former astronaut Mark Kelly said corporate money “poisons our democracy” and he would not accept corporate PAC contributions.
But Kelly’s campaign accepted thousands of dollars from business executives and lobbyists during the first three months of the year, raising questions about how “no corporate PAC” pledge candidates can actually separate themselves from special interests…
Kelly’s campaign drew a distinction between accepting corporate PAC money, which is tied directly to a corporation, and individual donations, even if they are from a corporation’s CEO.
“Mark isn’t taking a dime from corporate PACs because he believes they are corrupting our democracy to benefit their own bottom lines,” said Kelly’s campaign spokesman, Jacob Peters.
The FEC report bears him out, showing Kelly indeed received no money from corporate PACs. The Center for Responsive Politics found that some candidates who took the “no corporate PAC pledge” have taken donations from trade associations and other “business PACs,” but Kelly has not.
The States
CT News Junkie: News Associations Concerned Over Political Ad Reporting Requirements
By Christine Stuart
The Connecticut Broadcasters Association and the Connecticut Daily Newspaper Association are lobbying against legislation that seeks to target “online platforms” with reporting requirements for political advertising.
In an open letter to the General Administration and Elections Committee, which forwarded HB 7329 to the House on April 1 by a 12-3 vote, the news associations said the requirements in the bill would “create costly administrative burdens” and would act like a “hidden tax” on news organizations…
“The bill proposes to require reporting for requests for advertising, as well as actual transactions,” the associations wrote in their letter. “The number of requests for advertising for any entity that don’t come to fruition could number in the hundreds, if not thousands, making the reporting of those requests impractical and unrealistic.” …
Sen. Matt Lesser, who introduced similar legislation in SB 642, regarding reporting by “online platforms,” said his intention was to target large tech companies like Facebook and Google, but the news associations are wary about what they see as an overly broad definition of “online platforms” in the bill…
David McGuire, Executive Director of the ACLU of Connecticut, also submitted testimony in opposition to SB 642, suggesting that its restrictions run counter to constitutional free speech protections.
“Senate Bill 642 would inappropriately include in the above mentioned categories an expenditure that displays the name, face, or voice of a candidate 90 days or less before an election if the expenditure was ‘not made neutrally or evenly as to’ the candidate and their opponents,” McGuire wrote. “The expenditures this bill seeks to include are not limited to where there is a connection to a candidate or campaign, nor does the bill focus on whether the expenditure is actually independent. Rather, it focuses on what is being advertised, the speech itself.”
