In the News
Tacoma News Tribune: Group that wants to provide legal help to Eyman starts fight with disclosure commission
By Alexis Krell
A group that wants to represent anti-tax activist Tim Eyman in his appeal has sued over how state campaign finance law might apply to its pro bono legal work.
The Institute for Free Speech, a national nonprofit, filed the lawsuit against members of the state Public Disclosure Commission and against the state Attorney General’s Office Aug. 2 in U.S. District Court in Tacoma.
“With the advice of the Attorney General’s office, we expect to respond in court,” the PDC said in a statement Thursday.
Attorney General Bob Ferguson sued Eyman for violating campaign finance laws, and earlier this year a Thurston County judge fined Eyman $2.6 million.
Superior Court Judge James Dixon found Eyman to be a “continuing political committee,” that he hadn’t properly filed campaign finance reports, and that he put donors’ contributions to personal use, The Olympian reported.
The Institute for Free Speech said it wants to represent Eyman on appeal, but that his designation as a “continuing political committee” raised questions about whether the institute would be subject to campaign finance laws if they represented him for free.
It asked the PDC for an order earlier this year to clarify that representing Eyman wouldn’t be an in-kind contribution that would require the group to register under the Fair Campaign Practices Act, file reports under that law, or to disclose its donors and other information, such as how much its services are worth.
Congress
Wall Street Journal: Democrats Reboot Stalled Election-Law Push
By Siobhan Hughes and Alexa Corse
Democratic lawmakers were working to finalize whittled-down elections legislation as they reached Friday’s anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act…
Senate Rules Committee Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) met on Thursday with other Democrats including Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) to iron out some remaining sticking points.
The Democrats have agreed to narrow the bill, with an emphasis on voting procedures, and scale back their sweeping elections and ethics measure known as the “For the People Act,” which touches on everything from how districts are drawn to how campaigns are financed and how ballots may be cast.
“We’re making good progress,” Sen. Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.), who is involved in negotiations, said on Thursday night. “We still have some distance to go.” …
The negotiations are centered on a framework proposed by Mr. Manchin, who was the lone Senate Democrat to publicly oppose the “For the People Act,” calling it too broad and too partisan.
National Review: The Senate Should Pass Senator Rubio’s Bill Demanding Mandatory Disclosure of Big Tech’s Communications with the Government
By Charles C.W. Cooke
Senator Marco Rubio has introduced a bill that would require America’s social-media firms to make public any “requests or recommendations regarding content moderation” that come from the U.S. government (or any other governments). This is an excellent idea, and Congress should pass it swiftly.
There are a host of legal and philosophical problems with the idea that the federal government should regulate the internal deliberations of privately owned companies such as Facebook and Twitter. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with Americans demanding to know to what extent their own government is engaging in that process. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, the federal government works for us, and it has no “rights” to speak of in this area. If they wish, those who are in charge of that government may contact a private company and make a “request” or a “suggestion.” But it is reasonable for voters to expect to know when they do.
The Courts
Associated Press: Judge reinstates contractor fired after criticizing lawmaker
A federal judge reinstated an Arkansas attorney’s contract with the state Friday after the state canceled it when he criticized a lawmaker’s support for banning gender-confirming treatments for transgender youths.
Chief U.S. District Judge D.P. Marshall Jr. issued the preliminary injunction in Little Rock that restored Casey Copeland’s contract with the state’s Administrative Office of the Courts.
Marshall issued the order verbally after hearing arguments between the state and the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, which is litigating the case…
In a statement, Copeland said he was relieved at his reinstatement… “A citizen’s right to political speech is essential to our democracy and no one should be afraid of speaking their mind to their elected representative on issues that impact their friends, family, and state,” [he said.]
Said Holly Dickson, executive director of the ACLU of Arkansas: “State legislators may not like hearing from constituents who are unhappy with their actions, but they can’t use the power of the state to retaliate against people because they disagree with them on a certain issue.”
Fundraising
Axios: Scoop: Dem fundraising platform ActBlue boots Cuomo
By Lachlan Markay
The Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue has removed a donation page that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s campaign committee used to solicit contributions, the company confirmed to Axios.
ActBlue is the lifeblood of grassroots Democratic fundraising…
Cuomo has historically raised very little through the sorts of small-dollar donations that ActBlue generally processes. But its decision to boot him from the platform is a major rebuke by a prominent node in the Democratic political apparatus.
New York Times: Trump’s Repeating Donation Tactics Led to Millions in Refunds Into 2021
By Shane Goldmacher
The aggressive fund-raising tactics that former President Donald J. Trump deployed late in last year’s presidential campaign have continued to spur an avalanche of refunds into 2021, with Mr. Trump, the Republican Party and their shared accounts returning $12.8 million to donors in the first six months of the year, newly released federal records show.
The refunds were some of the biggest outlays that Mr. Trump made in 2021 as he has built up his $102 million political war chest — and amounted to roughly 20 percent of the $56 million he and his committees raised online so far this year.
Lobbying
Newsweek: Lobbying Allows Americans to Exercise Their Constitutional Rights
By Tim Huelskamp
Greenpeace—an environmental advocacy organization—recently had one of its staffers pose as a recruitment consultant in a virtual interview with top lobbyists for a Fortune 500 company. It released the filmed conversation to the public and later appeared to take credit for “unearthing” the company’s use of “cynical, aggressive lobbying techniques to pull the strings of government.”…
[As] a former member of Congress, I can speak to how absurd it is that so many advocacy organizations and reporters have misused this fake interview to claim that lobbying categorically tilts the political playing field in favor of corporate America. This is simply not the case…
Sure, big corporate lobbyists are easy to villainize, but it isn’t just big corporations that benefit from these types of services. Lobbying presents a unique opportunity for marginalized and lesser-known groups to have their voices heard…
Without it, lawmakers would likely vote along strict party lines, taking direction only from their respective leadership, rather than taking the time and effort to understand why certain groups and constituents believe certain proposals would harm or better their communities. Is that really what anyone wants?
Free Speech
Tennessean: Impulse to silence controversial views more dangerous than Federalist Society
By George Scoville
[T]he reflexive impulse to punish people for espousing views with which we disagree, and the groups with which those people associate, is far more dangerous to American life than the private activities of people who also happen to be members of a debating society…
I have been a member of the Federalist Society since before I decided to study law. It does not pay me to advocate that originalism is the best method for interpreting the Constitution’s text, nor does it give me marching orders about any of my various other personal views on public policy or law.
In fact, the Federalist Society does not take positions at all — not even on urgent legal or policy questions. At most, it provides forums for thought-provoking debates that almost always force me to critically examine my prior beliefs. That is nothing if not healthy in our hyper-partisan, ideologically polarized world…
[E]ven well-meaning censorship deprives us all, as that great liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill once postulated, of the opportunity to understand why “bad” views are bad and why “good” views are good.
Washington Examiner: The ‘disinformation’ deception
By David Harsanyi
Protecting people from the scourge of “misinformation” has been the leading rationale for censorship since nearly the beginning of the republic. In the second year of his presidency, John Adams griped that there had been “more new error propagated by the press in the last ten years than in a hundred years before 1798.” Congress soon helped Adams tackle the purported flood of misinformation by passing the Sedition Act, making the dissemination of “any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government” illegal. And, as with most censorship efforts, the law was soon used as a cudgel by those in power. The first person who found himself jailed under the new law was the rambunctious Adams critic Rep. Matthew Lyon of Vermont.
When President Woodrow Wilson became concerned that antiwar protesters would undermine support for his entrance into World War I, his allies passed another Sedition Act, empowering the postmaster general to censor any letter, pamphlet, or book that conveyed “false reports or false statements.” Wilson enacted censorship policies in conjunction with not only Congress, but with powerful newspaper owners and business interests. Numerous dissenters found themselves in prison, including the prominent socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs. Hardly anyone complained.
These days, every alleged font of misinformation — “white supremacy,” “Russian interference,” partisan debate over the pandemic — is an existential threat against democracy.
Online Speech Platforms
The Atlantic: Facebook Cares About Privacy—But Only If You’re an Advertiser
By Ethan Zuckerman
It should come as no surprise that many people—including academic researchers, journalists, the U.S. surgeon general—are very interested in the effects of misinformation and disinformation on society, and are particularly focused on information shared online. This profound desire to comprehend the relationship between our informational environment and civic behavior is necessary context for this week’s battle between social-media platforms and the scholars who want to understand them better.
On August 3, Facebook shut down the accounts of researchers associated with the Ad Observatory, an NYU-based research project that collected ads displayed on Facebook pages. According to Facebook, the researchers were engaged in unauthorized data collection, and they were stopped, Facebook explained, to “protect people’s privacy in line with our privacy program under the FTC Order.”
The order in question is the settlement Facebook confronted after an academic researcher transferred the personal data of 87 million Facebook users to the political-consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.
The States
Pennsylvania Capital-Star: W.Pa lawmaker wants to fight deepfakes in Pa. politics. But will he hit a 1st Amendment wall?
By Lindsay Weber
[State Rep. Nick Pisciottano] has introduced legislation that would make the dissemination of political deepfakes within 90 days of an election subject to civil liability and potential fines.
Deepfakes are videos and photos that use a form of artificial intelligence called deep learning to create convincing fake likenesses of people and events…
A particular problem, he says, is the possibility of a viral deepfake in the waning days of a campaign, where candidates have little time to refute a fake video of them doing or saying something incriminating before voters hit the polls…
A similar law in California has faced questions about its enforceability because many forms of political speech are protected by free speech, and deepfake political videos may well be considered protected free speech.
Pisciottano said he modeled the bill’s language off of existing laws that limit revenge porn and defamation to avoid legal challenges to the bill. The 90-day limit on deepfake circulation also aims to target election misinformation specifically without threatening other forms of free speech.
Los Angeles Times: California bill would limit protests at vaccination sites. Is that constitutional?
By Rachel Bluth
If enacted, Senate Bill 742 would make it punishable by up to six months in jail and/or a maximum fine of $1,000 to intimidate, threaten, harass or prevent people from getting a vaccine against COVID-19 or any other disease on their way to a vaccination site…
The bill defines harassment as getting within 30 feet of someone to hand them a leaflet, display a sign, participate in any kind of verbal protesting such as singing or chanting, or conduct any education or counseling with that person…
“That law is clearly unconstitutional,” [professor of First Amendment law Eugene] Volokh said.
He has two primary concerns with the proposal:
[First, a] 30-foot zone around a person getting a vaccine is bigger than the court would allow, Volokh believes.
His second concern is that the bill specifically prohibits someone from leafletting or talking to someone only about vaccines.
That violates the 1st Amendment, Volokh said, because it targets certain content. Someone could hand out an anti-war or anti-fur leaflet and not run afoul of the law, he said.
