Donor Privacy
Wall Street Journal: Beware of Anti-Speech Ballot Measures
Tracie Sharp and Darcy Olsen
When voters in Missouri, South Dakota, Washington and Oregon go to the polls in November, they will vote on ballot measures that are cleverly marketed as legislation aimed at reducing “big money” and “outside influence” in local elections. If passed, what these measures would really do is limit the ability of nonprofits like ours to weigh in on policy matters we care about. This is an infringement of our First Amendment rights.
The South Dakota Government Accountability and Anti-Corruption Act is a good example. Also known as Measure 22, it would force nonprofit organizations to report the names and addresses of their donors to the state government, subjecting them to possible investigation by an unelected ethics board that is given the power to subpoena private documents and overrule decisions made by the state attorney general if the board disagrees.
Independent Groups
Washington Free Beacon: Tom Steyer Denies Involvement in Anti-Exxon Campaign Promoted by His Groups
Lachlan Markay
“We’re definitely not pushing this thing,” Steyer said, according to Politico, when asked about his communications with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who has led efforts to bring fraud and racketeering charges against the company. “We are not part of this effort,” Steyer added.
In fact, the foremost arm of Steyer’s political operation, super PAC NextGen Climate Action, has repeatedly promoted the effort and attempted to enlist federal and state officials in efforts to bring charges against Exxon for allegedly misleading the public and its shareholders about the dangers of climate change.
NextGen’s New Hampshire arm held a rally in April explicitly billed as an effort to advance Schneiderman’s anti-Exxon legal campaign.
The purpose of the rally was to convince New Hampshire Attorney General Joseph Foster “to join the investigation of Exxon Mobil and find the truth about whether Exxon Mobil intentionally misled the public about the risk climate change and fossil fuels pose to our communities,” according to a page on its website.
Baltimore Sun: Rep. John Delaney files FEC complaint over super PAC funded by opponent’s spouse
John Fritze
“Our campaign activities have been vetted by one of the best political attorneys in the country,” Hoeber said in a statement. “It shows that John Delaney is clearly worried — he can’t defend his record so he depends on making baseless attacks.”
With the Federal Election Commission often deadlocked over enforcement matters, the Delaney complaint is unlikely to advance, several experts said. But the complaint formally raises the question, brings media attention to the arrangement and signals Delaney is likely to harp on it during the campaign.
ABC News: Anti-Trump Super PAC Launches Pre-Debate Video Featuring Hofstra Students
Michael Falcone
“Since the Donald himself is coming to campus, these Hofstra students are standing up and sending a message that bigotry and hatred are not who we as Americans and not who they are as part of the Hofstra community,” Not Who We Are’s campaign manager Josh Hendler said in a statement.
Hendler’s group bills itself as a venue for “community members and leaders across the country” to “organize their friends, neighbors and coworkers to take a stand against” Trump by writing open letters.
Free Speech
WRAL Raleigh: Fayetteville teacher suspended for flag lesson on 1st amendment
Kathryn Brown
“I put the flag on the ground and I took two steps with my right foot and I said, ‘This is an example of free speech,'” Francis said. “Two students got up and left immediately with no word, no disruption at all…I assumed something had happened. One student came to where I was and took the flag from me.”
Francis has been suspended with pay in connection with the incident until he meets with Superintendent Dr. Frank Till on Thursday.
Francis, who has relatives in the military, said he did not intend to offend students, but wanted to drive home the Supreme Court’s definition of free speech …
In a statement, Superintendent Dr. Frank Till Jr. said in a statement, “Clearly there are other ways to teach First Amendment rights without desecrating a flag. The situation is currently under investigation.”
“I think he’s right, absolutely there could be other ways to teach the subject, but in the same vein the way that I taught it can’t necessarily be wrong,” Francis said.
New York Magazine: A University Is Threatening to Punish Students Who Discuss Their Suicidal Thoughts With Friends
Jesse Singal
As it turns out, Klawes was just one of dozens of NMU students, if not more, who have been told over the years that they could face disciplinary action for discussing their suicidal thoughts, according to an investigation and press release just published by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The ostensible goal of the policy is to “protect” students from other students’ suicidal thoughts and actions. But this policy, in addition to violating students’ free-speech rights, could also be doing serious harm to vulnerable students at NMU, according to mental-health experts.
New York Times: Will the Left Survive the Millennials?
Lionel Shriver
As a lifelong Democratic voter, I’m dismayed by the radical left’s ever-growing list of dos and don’ts — by its impulse to control, to instill self-censorship as well as to promote real censorship, and to deploy sensitivity as an excuse to be brutally insensitive to any perceived enemy. There are many people who see these frenzies about cultural appropriation, trigger warnings, micro-aggressions and safe spaces as overtly crazy. The shrill tyranny of the left helps to push them toward Donald Trump…
Moreover, people who would hamper free speech always assume that they’re designing a world in which only their enemies will have to shut up. But free speech is fragile. Left-wing activists are just as dependent on permission to speak their minds as their detractors.
FEC
Federal Election Commission: Letter to Rep. Robert A. Brady
Ann Ravel and Ellen Weintraub
In the alternative, three of our colleagues proposed adopting a new policy that would extend the reasoning of pre-Citizens United advisory opinions and expressly permit foreign-owned domestic subsidiaries to spend money in connection with federal elections, including on independent expenditures and contributions to super PACs, under certain circumstances. They also proposed creating out of whole cloth a new “safe harbor” to more easily facilitate this spending. Because substantively their proposal would have moved us in the wrong direction and procedurally would have deprived the public of an opportunity to comment on it, we opposed it.
As Justice Stevens noted in his dissent in Citizens United, “[u]nlike voters in U.S. elections, corporations may be foreign controlled,” and the majority’s decision “would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans.” In his State of the Union Address in 2010, President Obama warned about how Citizens United could “open the floodgates for special interests-including foreign corporations -to spend without limit in our elections. I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled … by foreign entities.” We agree. Unfortunately, three of our colleagues have prohibited the Commission from acting to address these concerns.
Citizens United
We the Internet: Nobody Knows What “Citizens United” Was About?
Lou Perez
Many citizens are united by their hate of Citizens United — the Supreme Court decision. We the Internet’s Lou Perez is on a mission to find out what it’s all about. He learns the more you hate it, the less you know about it.
IRS
American Prospect: Republicans Would Rather Impeach Than Disclose
Eliza Newlin Carney
Koskinen has apologized for the agency’s self-admitted mishandling of Tea Party groups. But obscured in the Tea Party flap is that the IRS is known less for its agressive enforcement than for its well-documented failure to police widespread abuse by politically active tax-exempt groups…
The heart of Republicans’ dispute with the IRS is whether nonprofit groups should be free to secretly spend millions on American elections. Tax laws fully shield such groups from having to disclose their donors. Yet since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC ruling to deregulate independent campaign spending, politically active tax-exempt groups have exploded in number. Such non-disclosing groups, mostly 501(c)(4) social welfare groups and 501(c)(6) trade groups, have spent $600 million on elections since that 2010 ruling.
Candidates and Campaigns
Wall Street Journal: Progressives Want Say on Filling Administration Posts If Hillary Clinton Wins
Brody Mullins and Michelle Hackman
The strategy builds on efforts by Mrs. Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, and other progressives to block Obama administration nominees seen as too close to big business. The group claimed a win in 2015 when its opposition to Antonio Weiss because of his Wall Street ties led him to withdraw from consideration for a key Treasury Department post.
The position was never filled and Mr. Weiss has served as a counselor to the Treasury secretary.
The groups say they plan to present their candidates to Mrs. Clinton’s transition team, should she win the November election, in a bid to fill her administration with officials they believe will implement progressive economic policies…
Every Voice, an advocacy organization to limit the role of money in politics, is focusing on positions with influence over lobbying and election campaigns, such as commissioners for the Federal Election Commission and Federal Communications Commission, according to Rahna Epting, the group’s chief of staff.
Politico: Trump’s campaign paid his businesses $8.2 million
Kenneth P. Vogel and Isaac Arnsdorf
The GOP presidential nominee’s campaign has paid his various businesses for services including rent for his campaign offices ($1.3 million), food and facilities for events and meetings ($544,000) and payroll for Trump corporate staffers ($333,000) who helped with everything from his traveling security to his wife’s convention speech.
In all, the Trump campaign’s payments to Trump-owned businesses account for about 7 percent of its $119 million spending total, the analysis found.
That’s an unprecedented amount of self-dealing in federal politics. Even the wealthiest of candidates have refrained from tapping their businesses’ resources to such an extensive degree…
The States
Los Angeles Times: California’s Citizens United proposition started with a chat at Starbucks
Sarah D. Wire
Voters had just passed a similar measure in Los Angeles with 76% of the vote, and Sutter and others at her nonprofit — Money Out, Voters In — wanted to give the entire state a say on whether the 55 Californians they send to Congress should fight to overturn the controversial 2010 Citizens United decision that has allowed money to flood American elections.
For months, Sutter had contacted any likely legislative sponsor and sat down with a half-dozen members without luck, she said. The deadline to file bills in the California Legislature was just a week or so away.
“It’s a little like shopping a screenplay,” she said, where people liked the idea but didn’t want to commit…
The proposal merely instructs the congressional delegation to work to overturn Citizens United. It is an advisory measure that does not change law.
Argus Leader: Secret funders in fight over campaign transparency
Dana Ferguson
Groups on both sides of a ballot measure that would overhaul the state’s campaign finance system have been reluctant to disclose funding sources.
South Dakotans for Integrity, the group proposing the reform package, and Defeat 22, which opposes it, have accused the other of hiding ties to out-of-state interests. Neither would share fundraising details in response to an Argus Leader Media request this week.
State law doesn’t require campaigns to report fundraising sources until October 25, two weeks before the election and a month after the start of early absentee voting.
