Congress
Politico: Playbook
By Ryan Lizza, Rachael Bade, Tara Palmeri, and Eugene Daniels
Schumer today will designate a sweeping package of campaign reforms as the honorary first bill of the Congress, S.1. The “For The People Act,” written by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), is expected to include provisions making it easier to vote nationwide, including with automatic voter registration or same-day voter registration; limiting dark money in politics, including with new disclosure requirements for outside funding; nonpartisan redistricting; public financing of campaigns and increased lobbying disclosures.
In the House, Democrats scrapped plans to vote on a similar measure earlier this month, as our Congress team has reported, though it’s likely to reemerge. Moderate Democrats balked at the notion of publicly financing campaigns – even as progressives view the legislation as a top priority.
The Hill: Democrats seize on GOP donor fallout
By Alex Gangitano
Democrats are seizing on the fallout from donors distancing themselves from Republicans, with lawmakers and advocacy groups saying it’s a rare opportunity to change fundraising rules and the influence corporations have on campaigns.
Progressives are ramping up calls to permanently eliminate corporate PAC contributions, while moderate Democrats see an opening to win over business groups and leaders who have traditionally thrown much of their support behind Republicans…
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said the renewed debate over corporate PACs is also shedding a light on the dangers of dark money – funding to influence policy from an undisclosed source, allowing corporate donors to sidestep public scrutiny.
Free Speech
Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): Why do different positions in the government receive different types of free speech rights?
By Josh Blackman and Seth Barrett Tillman
The House Judiciary Committee report took the position that the President’s free speech rights are more limited than the rights of a private citizen. The report favorably cited posts by co-bloggers Professors Jonathan Adler and Ilya Somin, as well as other academics who reached similar conclusions. The Committee apparently assumed that the President’s free speech rights could be analogized to those of civil servants. The committee staff reported that the First Amendment “applies very differently to speech by government officials and public employees,” and the President “is no ordinary citizen.” The report continued, “the President is subject to different rules than private citizens and can be held accountable for his expression (including all expression relating to his office) in ways that [private citizens] cannot be.” In our view, there are problems with analogizing the President to civil servants. In this post, we will explain our thinking. Our views concern First Amendment rights in general, and not the circumstances of the impeachment process in particular. But our general position would also apply in the specific impeachment context.
The Media
New York Times: Fox Settled a Lawsuit Over Its Lies. But It Insisted on One Unusual Condition.
By Ben Smith
On Oct. 12, 2020, Fox News agreed to pay millions of dollars to the family of a murdered Democratic National Committee staff member, implicitly acknowledging what saner minds knew long ago: that the network had repeatedly hyped a false claim that the young staff member, Seth Rich, was involved in leaking D.N.C. emails during the 2016 presidential campaign. (Russian intelligence officers, in fact, had hacked and leaked the emails.) …
But there was one curious provision that Fox insisted on: The settlement had to be kept secret for a month – until after the Nov. 3 election. The exhausted plaintiffs agreed.
Why did Fox care about keeping the Rich settlement secret for the final month of the Trump re-election campaign? Why was it important to the company, which calls itself a news organization, that one of the biggest lies of the Trump era remain unresolved for that period? Was Fox afraid that admitting it was wrong would incite the president’s wrath? Did network executives fear backlash from their increasingly radicalized audience, which has been gravitating to other conservative outlets?
Independent Groups
Center for Responsive Politics: Corporations rethinking PACs leave the door to ‘dark money’ open
By Anna Massoglia
Several major corporations started the New Year with resolutions swearing off corporate PAC spending after violent attacks on the U.S. Capitol. But they appear to have left the door open to continue bankrolling less transparent groups.
“Dark money” groups and other politically active nonprofits received more than $100 million since 2015 from 24 companies that are cutting off political donations to the 147 members of Congress who voted against certifying presidential election results, reviewing corporate PAC giving or pausing contributions from their PACs entirely.
That’s according to an OpenSecrets investigation using data from the Center for Political Accountability, a nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks donations disclosed by publicly owned companies.
In 2019 alone, many of the companies made more contributions to politically-active nonprofits than they did PAC contributions during the entire two-year 2020 election cycle. Dark money groups poured more than $750 million into 2020 elections through political contributions and advertising.
Online Speech Platforms
Wall Street Journal: The ‘Common Carrier’ Solution to Social-Media Censorship
By Tunku Varadarajan
The gagging of the president by America’s digital behemoths provokes in [Richard Epstein] a mix of indignation and distress. A professor at the New York University Law School, he is the foremost libertarian legal scholar in the common-law world. (Mr. Epstein, 77, directs NYU’s Classical Liberal Institute, where I am a fellow.) We converse by Zoom, and he says that he’d tell Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg of Twitter and Facebook, respectively, to “give Trump his account back.”
Mr. Epstein envisions the two CEOs as a captive audience: “I’d say to them, ‘Boys, you’ve got to lighten up. You have to be less confident that you know the truth about everything. You know you’re doing your job when you publish stuff on your site that you strongly disagree with, and not in winning the short-term battle of keeping this, that, or the other guy out.”
Mr. Epstein describes Mr. Dorsey’s Jan. 13 Twitter thread, in which the CEO purports to explain the ban on Mr. Trump, as displaying “a rare combination of hubris and ignorance, proof of how dangerous it is to have a committed partisan as an ostensible umpire.” Among many assertions that Mr. Epstein finds “questionable” in the thread is Mr. Dorsey’s argument that “if folks do not agree with our rules and enforcement, they can simply go to another Internet service.”
Washington Post: We’re better off without Trump on Twitter. And worse off with Twitter in charge.
By Zephyr Teachout
Complaints by some conservatives that Trump had been “censored” by the tech platforms were greeted in many quarters with derision: The First Amendment, after all, does not typically apply to the decisions of private corporations. But that’s an artificially narrow view of the question. These companies, at the heart of our communications infrastructure, play an undeniable public role. And it was not only conservatives who expressed concern: The ACLU pointed out that “unchecked” private power was dangerous in this context, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel objected to the ban. Both suggested that a democracy should not be in a position where the decisions of a few unaccountable executives can restructure speech in politics…
In short, we face overlapping democratic emergencies: the need to address the coup attempt and ongoing threats of violence, and the need to address the role played by big social media companies in our democracy – which includes enabling hyperpolarized political views, white nationalism, and general distrust of institutions and other Americans. The issue is one of extremely concentrated corporate power, and although the platforms are “private,” doing nothing would be unusual. We have a long tradition in the United States of regulating companies that dominate whole sectors of the economy, particularly in areas that profoundly affect the public sphere.
Biden Transition
By Victor Reklaitis
As President-elect Joe Biden prepares to take office on Wednesday, prominent U.S. companies are making donations to support his inaugural events, even as the proceedings will be largely online and scaled back…
Michael Beckel, research director at Issue One, said “not accepting large corporate contributions for his inaugural committee could have been a way for President-elect Biden to telegraph a commitment to upending the influence game in Washington.”
Beckel, whose watchdog group aims to reduce the influence of big money in politics, also said donors typically give to groups like inaugural committees because they want something in return.
“Making a large contribution to an inaugural committee is a way to try to ingratiate yourself with an incoming president and a way to try to curry access and influence with a new administration,” he told MarketWatch in an email. “While activities around this year’s inauguration will be dramatically reduced, many large donors are hoping for access to special VIP events in the future.”
Business Insider: Biden’s inauguration is raising tens of millions of dollars but won’t say how it’s spending the money
By Dave Levinthal
[A]s Biden raises tens of millions of dollars toward [the inauguration], including from corporate giants with big business before the federal government, his inaugural committee has so far refused to reveal how it’s spending its cash – despite touting a robust political money reform agenda heavy on enhanced transparency.
It’s a decision that’s irking several prominent progressive organizations. And they hope Biden will change his mind.
In the meantime, Biden’s decision means he’s keeping from public view information about who’s making money off his inauguration activities, such as consultants, operatives, and vendors. The public may also never know how the Biden inaugural committee spends any surplus cash it generates.
“We think the Biden inauguration committee should voluntarily disclose their spending and that Congress should propose legislation that would require full disclosure of inaugural committee spending,” said Jana Morgan, director of Declaration for American Democracy, a coalition of more than 170 good-government and left-leaning organizations that support a sweeping government ethics reform agenda…
“We favor full disclosure,” said Patrick Burgwinkle, spokesperson for campaign finance reform group End Citizens United.
The States
By Hicham Raache
An Oklahoma State Senator filed legislation to provide Oklahomans legal recourse if a social media platform unfairly targets posts or accounts over political or religious speech.
State Senator Rob Standridge (R-Norman), who filed Senate Bill 383, said the bill’s aim is to ensure the fair treatment of political and religious speech…If the bill passes, Oklahomans can sue the owner or operator of a social media website if the website purposefully deletes or censors a user’s political or religious speech, or uses an algorithm to suppress such speech.
“Users would be able to seek damages of a minimum of $75,000 per intentional deletion or censoring of that user’s speech, along with actual damages and punitive damages if aggravating factors are present. The prevailing party may also be awarded costs and reasonable attorney fees,” the news release states.
