New from the Institute for Free Speech
Candidates Fined for Criticizing Governor’s Agenda Will Get Their Day in Court
After seven years, a Connecticut court will finally rule on a First Amendment challenge brought by two former General Assembly candidates who were fined for championing their efforts to oppose the governor’s agenda in mailers. A decision handed down late yesterday by the Connecticut Supreme Court resolved a dispute over the timeliness of the appeal and ordered the case to go forward.
“The Court recognized that it was unfair to penalize our clients, and to deny them the opportunity to defend their constitutional rights, for timing their appeal from the Commission’s actual decision rather than its earlier failure to make a decision. We look forward to reaching the merits of the case: whether Connecticut can violate the First Amendment by prohibiting campaigns from referencing candidates other than their opponents,” said Institute for Free Speech Senior Attorney and Deputy Vice President for Litigation Owen Yeates, who represents the candidates in the appeal…
To read the Connecticut Supreme Court’s ruling, click here. For more information about the case, click here.
Congress
CNN: Democrats searching for a path forward on stalled voting rights bill
By Ted Barrett, Lauren Fox, and Ali Zaslav
Senate Democrats will huddle privately next week to continue their internal deliberations over how to advance a sweeping voting rights, government ethics and campaign finance bill that is one of their party’s top legislative priorities but is currently doomed to fail in the Senate because it is opposed by one of their own members as well as all 50 Republicans.
The Wednesday meeting, which was confirmed by a Senate Democratic aide, is a follow up to a session last week that left some Democratic senators concerned that significant changes to the bill are needed to bring around Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and attract at least 10 GOP senators to break a filibuster and make a law…
Manchin won’t say if he’ll vote to advance the bill to the floor even if he ultimately opposes it. If Schumer is unable to sway the West Virginia Democrat to back the bill, he may be forced to rethink his approach since Republicans would be able to argue there was bipartisan opposition to bill…
Assuming they can convince Manchin to support the bill, some Democrats want to then weaken filibuster rules in order to pass the voting rights legislation. But that’s a step Manchin and other Democrats, notably Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, have said they would refuse to take.
It leaves Democrats and their top legislative priority stalled…
Meantime, Republicans are not showing any signs they will come to support the bill.
Deseret News: The For the People Act is really just the opposite
By Derek Monson
[S. 1] would also restrict free speech in elections by attacking the privacy of anonymous donations to charitable enterprises. When you give money to a politician, that donation is disclosed by law to curb bribery. When you give money to the Rotary Club, or other social or religious causes, that donation is not, and emphatically should not be, disclosed publicly.
But if the For the People Act passes, donations to nonprofit civic institutions along with your name and home address just might be disclosed. That’s because if a group you support so much as mentions an elected politician or candidate for office in their issue-focused communications, it opens itself up to new disclosure laws. As has happened in the past, such disclosure will open donors up to politically-driven harassment.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer admitted that a part of this legislation, known as the Disclose Act, would have a “deterrent effect” on political speech and stated that it is “good to have a deterrent effect.” The people’s free expression of their views should not be deterred; it should be encouraged.
Unfortunately, our country has a long history of civic organizations pushing for important societal changes while governments try to intimidate their members into silence. During the tumultuous civil rights battles of the 1950s, Alabama tried to get the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s membership lists to harass them. The Supreme Court ruled that violated their Constitutional rights.
Now is not the time to further divide our country, erode trust in elections and chill speech.
FEC
Center for Responsive Politics: FEC complaint accuses Marjorie Taylor Greene of violating election law
By Alyce McFadden
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) may have violated campaign finance law by soliciting “soft-money” donations to Stop Socialism NOW, a super PAC, in a video ad.
The ad is the subject of a new complaint to the Federal Elections Commission, filed Friday by nonprofit watchdog Common Cause. It alleges that Greene’s appearance in the video constitutes unlawful solicitation of unlimited contributions by a candidate on behalf of a super PAC. The ad in question, titled “Fight Back NOW,” targets Democratic Georgia Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, who won runoff elections against Republican incumbents in early January.
Though Greene does not explicitly call on viewers to contribute money to the super PAC in her appearance, she says: “It’s time to fight back now, before it’s too late.” Seconds later, a voiceover asks viewers to “make a contribution today to Stop Socialism NOW PAC.” According to the complaint filed by Common Cause, this context makes Greene’s participation in the ad an “implicit” solicitation in violation of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, also referred to as the McCain-Feingold Act.
Free Speech
Washington Post: Hey conservatives, this is why liberals don’t believe you care about free speech
By Alyssa Rosenberg
If conservatives wonder why liberals aren’t inclined to trust their supposed concern for free speech, controversies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Associated Press would be a good place to start.
In North Carolina, the university’s board of trustees denied a recommendation from the journalism school to award tenure to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones after a pressure campaign from conservative activists. And the Associated Press fired news associate Emily Wilder after the Stanford College Republicans called her an “anti-Israel agitator,” highlighting her social media posts about Israel and Palestinians, written when she was a Stanford student.
Conservatives who claim to value a wide-ranging clash of ideas face a stark choice. They can prove they mean what they say by defending Hannah-Jones, Wilder and the concept of a truly broad spectrum of public opinion. Or they can demonstrate — as the civil libertarian Nat Hentoff put it — that they believe in free speech “for me, but not for thee.”
SFGate: An interview with Emily Wilder, recent Stanford grad fired from AP job over criticisms of Israel
By Eric Ting
Emily Wilder, a journalist and 2020 graduate of Stanford University, started a new job as an Associated Press news associate based in Maricopa County, Arizona, on May 3.
Two weeks later, she was unceremoniously fired by the news outlet after conservatives resurfaced old social media posts that drew attention from Republicans as prominent as Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton. In Wilder’s eyes, her firing is the latest example of right-wing cancel culture.
“There’s no question I was just canceled,” Wilder told SFGATE by phone Thursday afternoon. “This is exactly the issue with the rhetoric around ‘cancel culture.’ To Republicans, cancel culture is usually seen as teens or young people online advocating that people be held accountable over accusations of racism or whatever it may be, but when it comes down to who actually has to deal with the lifelong ramifications of the selective enforcement of cancel culture — specifically over the issue of Israel and Palestine — it’s always the same side.”
Wilder, who worked with the Arizona Republic upon graduation until this May, became a national news story after the Stanford College Republicans wrote a Twitter thread Monday highlighting Wilder’s pro-Palestine activism in college as well as some of her old Facebook posts.
Online Speech Platforms
Independent: Palestinians’ Digital Rights ‘Violated’ By Censorship On Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, New Report Claims
By Adam Smith
There has been a “dramatic increase” in the censorship of Palestinian political speech on social media over the past two weeks, during the period of intense fighting between Israel and militants in Gaza.
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have all been used by Palestinians to share information from, among a variety of areas, the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah where families face eviction.
However the report from 7amleh, The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, shared exclusively with The Independent, argues that social media companies’ moderation attempts and codes of conduct have resulted in numerous citizens’ accounts being taken down.
The States
Newsweek: Indiana School Board Orders LGBT Pride Flags Removed from High School Classrooms
By Cammy Pedroja
An Indiana school board has caused controversy this week with their decision to order three Pendleton Heights High School teachers to remove rainbow flags from their classrooms.
District officials have said that rainbow LGBT Pride flags which they ordered be removed from the Spanish, French, and art classrooms on Tuesday, violated the school’s no “political paraphernalia” policy.
“The issue with displaying the flag in a school is a double-edged sword. If an LGBTQ+ flag is allowed to be displayed, then any other group would have the same ability. That could include such flags as supporting white supremacy, which is in direct conflict with LGBTQ+. I hope we can model equality and support through our actions,” South Madison Board of Trustees President Bill Hutton said in an email sent to students, parents, and staff accompanying the removal of the flags.
Cleveland.com: FirstEnergy’s push to defend House Bill 6 payments as ‘contributions’ appears to veer from corporate strategy
By John Caniglia
In the past seven months, FirstEnergy Corp. appeared to follow the playbook of how to move beyond a political scandal…
Despite its work over the months, the company appeared to veer from the playbook when its attorneys filed documents Tuesday to fend off a legal attack from investors. In those filings, the company insists the payments for Householder weren’t bribes; they were campaign contributions shipped through a nonprofit that collected them and doled them out to whip up support for the bill’s passage.
