In the News
The Daily Signal: Exclusive: Liberal Senator Preparing Report That Dismisses Allegations of IRS’ Tea Party Targeting
By Hans von SpakovskyCCP’s complaint cannot be easily dismissed. It is a non-partisan, third-party organization that is not part of the IRS investigations. It is headed by former Federal Election Commission chairman Bradley Smith. Its complaint raises serious ethics issue over a senator trying to use a federal agency against his political opponents and is supported by more than 100 pages of exhibits.Nonetheless, it seems Levin does not believe that such behavior, as well as the pending ethics complaints against him, poses any conflict of interest to his continued oversight of the subcommittee’s investigation.Former FEC chairman Brad Smith, the head of CCP, says that Levin’s report on the IRS “is really his defense brief, masquerading as congressional fact-finding.” It is his Wizard of Oz way of saying “pay no attention to what the IRS did behind the curtain.”
Legal Newsline: Federal lawsuit challenges McCain-Feingold disclosure law
By David Yates“While the government may require disclosure for speech related to elections, a long line of Supreme Court cases protect the First Amendment right to speak about public issues while maintaining the privacy of speakers and their supporters,” said Allen Dickerson, CCP’s legal director who is also representing the Institute.“Congress and the state of Colorado have confused clear and honest discussion of the workings of government with ads supporting or opposing candidates. That distinction is vital in a democracy, where citizens have a right to have and express views on public policy without publicly registering with the state.”To protect its donors, the institute asked the U.S. District Court of the District of Colorado to declare that the First Amendment forbids the state from regulating this ad. The Institute filed its lawsuit against the federal regulations in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, requesting an order protecting the think tank’s right to speak without fear of violating its donors’ privacy.
NPR (To the Point): Without Limits, Will Campaign Contributions Dominate Politics?
There’s just nine weeks left before the mid-term elections—and there’s more money than ever for Senate and House campaigns. In April, Alabama businessman Shaun McCutcheon gave his name to a US Supreme Court decision to eliminate legal restrictions on how much an individual can give in total to candidates and committees. McCutcheon says it’s great to have more money in politics—putting it this way: “we’re just spreading speech.” What’s the likely impact of more money in politics—this year and in years to come?Features CCP Chairman Bradley A. Smith, Matea Gold, Lawrence Noble, and Alex Isenstadt
National Review: Wisconsin Prosecutors’ Attack on the First Amendment Gets to the Seventh Circuit
By Hans A. von SpakovskyIn a civil-rights lawsuit filed by Wisconsin Club for Growth, one of the targets of the investigation, federal district court judge Rudoph Randa put an end to this partisan witch-hunt, saying that the prosecutors were trying to criminalize political speech. That decision has been appealed to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals by the prosecutors, who are particularly upset over the fact that the judge refused to give them immunity from civil liability after he concluded they had acted without probable cause and because their interpretation of the law was “simply wrong.”On Tuesday, four former commissioners of the Federal Election Commission, including Lee Ann Elliott, David Mason, Darryl Wold, and me, filed an amicus brief in the appeals court on the side of the conservative organizations unfairly targeted for exercising their First Amendment rights. Our brief is available here.Former FEC chairman Brad Smith also filed an amicus brief in the case.
Watchdog.org: First Amendment big guns back targets of John Doe probe
By M.D. KittleMADISON, Wis. — Some of the sharpest First Amendment minds in the country are weighing in on a Wisconsin-based civil rights case that is testing the boundaries of prosecutors’ power and the protections of free speech.In advance of next week’s oral arguments before the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals,at least five former Federal Election Commission members, including four former chairpersons, have filed amicus briefs with the court in support of the conservative targets of a sweeping and politically charged John Doe investigation.The commissioners, including Lee Ann Elliott, David Mason, Hans von Spakovsky,Darryl Wold and Bradley Smith, have submitted two requests to intervene in the appeal, sought by John Doe prosecutors, now defendants in a civil rights lawsuit filed by conservative activist Eric O’Keefe and the Wisconsin Club for Growth.
The Objective Standard: Speech Isn’t Free when Government Requires Speakers to Register and Report
By Ari ArmstrongImagine how America’s Founders would have reacted if politicians had tried to force them to register with the government in order to speak their minds about politics. Needless to say, they would have acted decisively and quickly against such tyranny.But in many contexts today, under federal and state laws, people legally must register with the government and file reports with the government in order to speak their minds about political issues. Such laws flagrantly violate people’s rights to freedom of speech.Thankfully, the Center for Competitive Politics (CCP) is working to overturn such rights-violating laws by challenging the relevant laws in court. Recently the organization filed suit challenging federal and state campaign finance disclosure laws on behalf of the Independence Institute in Colorado (disclosure: I have written for this organization).
Amending the First Amendment
United Liberty: Get ready for a showdown over free speech: Harry Reid will push partial repeal of the First Amendment next week
By Jason PyeBut the proposed amendment does more than target corporations, which are often a target of President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats. “Let’s be clear, this amendment doesn’t just do it for corporations, it doesn’t just do it for billionaires — nothing in this amendment is limited to corporations or billionaires,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) warned his colleagues in June. “This amendment is about power and it is about politicians silencing the citizens.”
IRS
Wall Street Journal: Emails Raise New Questions About IRS Targeting
By John D. McKinnonPerhaps the most intriguing of the new documents shows that IRS officials had some sort of “secret research project” going that related to the donor lists it had collected – inappropriately, as it turned out – from many conservative nonprofit groups.The IRS demanded the donor lists in the course of reviewing dozens of conservative groups’ applications for tax-exempt status starting in 2010. An inspector general found in 2013 that the IRS targeted many of those conservative groups for improper scrutiny, including the demands for donor identities. Democrats say some liberal groups eventually were caught up in the net as well.Unfortunately, it’s not at all clear yet what this “secret research project” concerned. If the project involved the IRS systematically targeting conservative donors for extra scrutiny too – as some GOP lawmakers suspect – that’s a very big deal.
Independent Groups
More Soft Money Hard Law: The Mayday PAC and Progressive Politics
By Bob BauerMayday is a single issue PAC. It is consumed with the objective of campaign finance reform and it intends to establish its independent spending as the decisive factor in the election of candidates who will vote for campaign finance reform. So it is a “funder-constituent”: it is not made up of constituents defined as residents of the states or districts where it will be active. Its objective is to win races with a show of financial force—independent spending—and to show that but for the money, the candidate would not have won. Already, after the Arizona Democratic primary, Professor Lessig is emphasizing the size of Mayday’s expenditures on behalf of the winner, Rubin Gallego: “even though we were in the race for just a couple of weeks, we spent 30% as much was spent in Gallego’s whole campaign.”To this the PAC will answer that it will have established only the persuasive force of the argument for campaign finance reform. On this point, however, the reform argument is trapped by its own past claims and rhetoric.For years, reform advocates have insisted that heavy political spending does not reflect so much as it distorts the function of elections in reflecting voter choice. It inhibits true deliberation, and reform proposals have typically included initiatives to curb negative advertising and to establish other mechanisms for rational deliberation, such as different means of inducing candidates to accept debates. So there is no reason to believe that Mayday PAC’s 30-second ads are substantively superior to others: it will strike the impartial observer that these ads don’t seem to advance an appreciably richer argumentthan the run-of-the-mill variety. So the outcome of the PAC’s efforts cannot somehow represent a triumph of persuasive argument about reform if, on all other issues, this same type of spending and advertising is so tenuously related to rational deliberation.
Wall Street Journal: A First Amendment Education
EditorialThe Washington Post said Mr. Walker solicited contributions from donors “to give large contributions to an allied tax-exempt group that backed him and other state GOP lawmakers.” Well, no, because the Club for Growth never ran campaign ads for Mr. Walker. The New York Times NYT +0.16% said one of Mr. Walker’s campaign aides “directed the political spending of the outside groups, most of them nonprofits, and in effect controlled some of them.” No again, because one person’s relationship with two groups does not equal control or coordination under the law.In a recent online chat, a reader asked Daniel Bice, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s go-to reporter for prosecutors, why his articles failed to explain the difference between “express advocacy” and “issue advocacy”—a crucial distinction in the law on coordination between political campaigns and outside groups.“The reason we don’t go into great detail on express advocacy is that you can’t discuss it without going into great detail. As you just did,” Mr. Bice responded. So Mr. Bice admits that he leaves out crucial information because it’s all so very complicated. We’re sorry if campaign law has become so complex that the relevant details can’t fit in a newspaper article, but allow us to give it a try.
