In the News
Billboard Insider: Challenge to Tennessee’s Billboard Law
By Dave Westburg
The Institute for Free Speech, a non-profit advocacy group, will represent the plaintiff challenging Tennessee’s billboard law on constitutional grounds…
Sign owner William H. Thomas sued Tennessee’s billboard-control act, prompting a federal judge in Memphis to invalidate the state’s billboard law on First Amendment grounds. The case is Thomas v. Schroer. Defendant John Schroer is commissioner of Tennessee’s Department of Transportation and also president of AASHTO (American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials).
In October, the State of Tennessee appealed to the US Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals; its brief will be filed soon. The State argues that its regulation of billboards does not violate free speech…
On January 26, the Institute for Free Speech issued a press release saying it is representing plaintiff Thomas on appeal. The Institute was not involved in the case previously.
“A law that permits a sign that says ‘Fireworks for sale here,’ but prohibits an identical sign that reads ‘Support our troops,’ imposes a content-based restriction on speech,” said Institute [Legal] Director Allen Dickerson.
New from the Institute for Free Speech
Amy Klobuchar Knows Exactly What She’s Doing, and It Should Scare You
By Scott Blackburn
The Honest Ads Act is “important not just because of Russia,” Klobuchar suggested, “but because of all of the shenanigans that go on in campaigns that you want to be able to police.” …
Klobuchar further acknowledged that there’s “a lot of stuff going on that wouldn’t be covered [by the Honest Ads Act], the bots, the trolls” promoting “fake news.” As she sees it, that issue will take care of itself. Klobuchar relayed a story of vacationing in Ukraine with fellow Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham and “hearing stories of how their citizens have learned over time what this fake news is… and I think that’s actually going to start happening in America.” For all the bluster about how Honest Ads is going to fight back against Russian propaganda, Klobuchar doesn’t really think that’s a problem. She thinks Americans can accurately judge truthful messages from fake ones…
“The chances of the bill passing are small,” she said, “but the more you push on it, maybe it gets the FEC to act … If we hadn’t pushed, we wouldn’t even have some of the voluntary actions [from online companies] that we’re seeing now.” Klobuchar, for all her talk about fairness and democracy, is more than happy to get her way through extra-democratic means. She wants to use her bully pulpit to force a regulatory agency to impose new restrictions that won’t get through Congress. She wants the threat of regulation to cow internet companies to “voluntarily” enact the same policies that are in her bill.
Washington State Legislators to Nonprofits: Give Us Your Donor List or Shut Up
By Alex Baiocco
A political committee in Washington recently chose to disband because, like other volunteer-run political committees in the state, the group “found it impossible to operate without being repeatedly accused of having failed to comply with all of the requirements” of Washington’s current campaign finance law.
Lengthy and confusing reporting requirements, combined with the ability of private parties to bring complaints, inevitably create an environment that incentivizes weaponization of the law for political ends.
In the case of the 49th Legislative District Democrats, a political committee affiliated with the local Democratic Party, a conservative activist was able to effectively silence the group through such tactics…
A statement from the Clark County Democrats plainly said that the 49th Legislative District Democrats had fallen victim to the weaponization of “Washington’s well-intended but seriously flawed” campaign finance laws…
While precisely what activities will place a nonprofit within reach of the expanded regulatory net remains predictably unclear, one consequence of the DISCLOSE Act is certain: more groups that want to contribute to civic debate in Washington will be exposed to almost exactly the same circumstances that silenced the 49th Legislative District Democrats.
The Courts
ACLU: In First, Judge Blocks Kansas Law Aimed at Boycotts of Israel
The American Civil Liberties Union won an early victory today in its federal lawsuit arguing that a Kansas law requiring a public school educator to certify that she won’t boycott Israel violates her First Amendment rights.
A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the law while the case filed in October proceeds. It is the first ruling addressing a recent wave of laws nationwide aiming to punish people who boycott Israel.
The law, which took effect on July 1, requires that any person or company that contracts with the state submit a written certification that they are “not currently engaged in a boycott of Israel.” The ACLU is also currently fighting a case filed in December against a similar law in Arizona…
In his opinion, U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree wrote, “[T]he Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment protects the right to participate in a boycott like the one punished by the Kansas law.”
Congress
Sacramento Bee: Here’s a campaign finance law that would take democracy back from the 1 percent
By Rep. Ro Khanna (CA-17) and Bruce Ackerman
The Citizen Sovereignty Act grants each registered voter a special credit card account that can be spent for only one purpose: to support favored candidates in federal elections. Citizens could sign up on the internet for the right to spend fifty “democracy dollars” during every election cycle on the contest for the presidency, the Senate, and the House…
The statute is designed to respect all Supreme Court decisions guaranteeing candidates the right to raise private money and would be constitutional even under the Roberts Court. While the holy grail remains to overturn Citizens United and the Supreme Court’s flawed doctrine that money is speech, this initiative will allow us to reform our democracy without waiting helplessly for the court to change…
The point of the initiative is to kick off a conversation among reformers so that we don’t waste the next few years backing half-hearted initiatives.
Among reforms, the current favorite is the “matching grant” system that prevails in New York City and other places. Under this alternative, “small” contributions of up to $1,050 are matched 6-to-1 with public funds. But in New York, these “small” donations overwhelmingly come from the top ten percent earning more than $180,000 a year.
Congressional Research Institute: Washington Post Ad
On January 31st, CRI placed a display ad in the Washington Post. The claims in the ad are based on our three-year study which finds that congressional transparency overwhelmingly benefits the powerful and drives increasing inequality, partisanship, incarceration etc.
As such, our ad is targeted and addressed to a number of, likely, well-intentioned individuals and groups, who continue to advocate for harmful forms of government transparency…
In the ad we feature a number of citations from celebrated scholars and politicos on the dangers of transparency.
Free Speech
Electronic Frontier Foundation: Private Censorship Is Not the Best Way to Fight Hate or Defend Democracy: Here Are Some Better Ideas
By Corynne McSherry, Jillian C. York, and Cindy Cohn
From Cloudflare’s headline-making takedown of the Daily Stormer last autumn to YouTube’s summer restrictions on LGBTQ content, there’s been a surge in “voluntary” platform censorship. Companies-under pressure from lawmakers, shareholders, and the public alike-have ramped up restrictions on speech, adding new rules, adjusting their still-hidden algorithms and hiring more staff to moderate content. They have banned ads from certain sources and removed “offensive” but legal content.
These moves come in the midst of a fierce public debate about what responsibilities platform companies that directly host our speech have to take down-or protect-certain types of expression. And this debate is occurring at a time in which only a few large companies host most of our online speech. Under the First Amendment, intermediaries generally have a right to decide what kinds of expression they will carry. But just because companies can act as judge and jury doesn’t mean they should.
To begin with, a great deal of problematic content sits in the ambiguous territory between disagreeable political speech and abuse, between fabricated propaganda and legitimate opinion, between things that are legal in some jurisdictions and not others. Or they’re things some users want to read and others don’t. If many cases are in grey zones, our institutions need to be designed for them.
Forbes: Is Twitter Really Censoring Free Speech?
By Kalev Leetaru
The past month has seen a flurry of high profile announcements chronicling just how all-powerful social media companies have become in their control over what we see online. From Twitter’s nonchalant reminder of its ability to ban world leaders and their posts, to Facebook’s actual deletion of a head of state, Silicon Valley has been on the move to remind the world that it and it alone decides what we are permitted to see in its walled gardens that define our modern web. As we take stock of a new year, what does 2017 teach us about what to expect in the coming year? …
It is a remarkable turn of events that the company that once congratulated itself as “the free speech wing of the free speech party and famously informed Congress it would not stop alleged terrorists from leveraging its services has evolved to slowly and steadily distance itself from its free speech ethos. With each update of its terms of service, the company has moved a bit further towards prioritizing commercial reality over the anything-goes mentality upon which it was founded.
The States
Richmond Times-Dispatch: Senate Republicans stop bill that would ban personal use of campaign money
By Patrick Wilson
Virginia law allows a legislator to use campaign money for anything, except when closing out a campaign committee. Some lawmakers have reported expenditures on meals, gasoline or fancy hotel rooms, raising questions about whether the expenses are truly campaign-related.
Sen. Jill Holtzman Vogel, R-Fauquier, filed Senate Bill 592 to prohibit personal use of campaign money.
“I think just frankly as an ethics matter that we owe it to the commonwealth of Virginia constituents that we represent, most especially to the donors who contribute to our campaigns, to say, ‘That’s the law in Virginia and we certainly abide by that law,'” she told members of the Senate Privileges and Elections Committee, of which she is the chair.
Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Bath, wanted the committee to approve the bill, but Sen. John Cosgrove, R-Chesapeake, made a motion to kill it for the year and send it to the Virginia Conflict of Interest and Ethics Advisory Council to be studied.
“We mentioned this and ethics all in the same sentence,” Cosgrove said. “It would be my recommendation because of what we went through when we did ethics reform – and it was kind of ugly there for a while – that this bill be referred to the ethics committee so it gels with everything that goes on here.”
