In the News
American Thinker: Did Free Speech Destroy American Democracy?
By Joe Albanese
Demonizing political spending justifies policies aimed at deterring the rich in theory but that actually burden ordinary citizens. For every wealthy donor attacked on the floor of the U.S. Senate, there are many other average Americans harassed because the law requires that their political giving be put online. For every program sending tax dollars to politicians to supposedly reduce the sway of big donors, there is an increased chance that corrupt candidates will find new ways to cheat the system. Worse yet, efforts to deter political participation leave more power for abuse by government agencies – witness IRS abuses against Tea Party groups or pre-dawn police raids over alleged “coordination” between candidates and advocacy groups in Wisconsin…
What would make America more democratic would be enabling more political speech and participation. The recent decline in campaign finance restrictions has coincided with the breakdown of traditional party elites. The result is a rise in independent speech and more people running for office. It is hard to argue in the era of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders that elites have tightened their grasp on our elections.
Event
National Association of Business Political Action Committees: Regulating PACs and Political Engagement: A Briefing on State and Federal Trends
As America hurtles toward the 2018 elections, major questions continue to emerge about the regulation of political speech through social media and the Internet, whether patchwork state regulations will continue to complicate effective political engagement, and what Congress, the Federal Election Commission and other agencies might propose to address concerns about foreign threats to election integrity. Join three of the nation’s most respected election law experts as they discuss these issues and more.
Speakers:
NABPAC Legal Hotline Counsel Jan Baran – Wiley Rein, LLP
Former FEC Commissioner Lee Goodman – Wiley Rein, LLP
David Keating – Institute for Free Speech
Date: Tuesday, March 20, 2018
Time: 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Location: Wiley Rein Conference Center
Please note: Space is limited.
Free Speech
Reason: Trump’s Anti-Speech Agenda Gets a Boost From Lefty Lawyers and Academics
By J.D. Tuccille
So if you’re an academic with expertise in constitutional law, and you have months to watch a populist politician who commands the power of the presidency fulminate about punishing those who criticize him, what do you do? If you’re Georgetown Law’s Louis Michael Seidman, you suggest that the president might be on to something.
In a forthcoming paper, Seidman’s main complaint is that free speech doesn’t inherently favor progressivism-it allows too much voice to people who disagree. “At its core, free speech law entrenches a social view at war with key progressive objectives,” writes Seidman…
And Seidman isn’t alone in arguing from academia that free speech is overrated. His paper favorably quotes Laura Weinrib of the University of Chicago Law School, author of The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise. Weinrib complained in a Los Angeles Times op-ed last summer that “free speech has served to secure the political influence of wealthy donors,” while “labor’s strength has plummeted, and the Supreme Court is poised to recognize a 1st Amendment right of public sector employees to refuse to contribute to union expenses.”
Washington Post: People always think students are hostile to speech. They never really are.
By Andrew Hartman
In short, outrage about threats to free speech is overblown. It’s also ahistorical: The college campus – where young people, finding their place in the world, discover that the social order is not as it should be – has always been a breeding ground for protest. Sometimes these student actions displease the self-important graybeards who believe it is their job to police student behavior. Whenever there is student protest, there will be those who see it as a threat to American norms. (Gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan won the support of a majority of California voters in the 1960s by calling student protests “contrary to our standards of human behavior.”) And sometimes the demonstrations are uncivil and illiberal. But the long view shows us that campus-level revolts are not a threat to liberal values like free speech.
FEC
Politico: FEC probes whether NRA got illegal Russian donations
By Josh Meyer
The Federal Election Commission has launched a preliminary investigation into whether Russian entities gave illegal contributions to the National Rifle Association that were intended to benefit the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election, according to people who were notified of the probe.
The inquiry stems in part from a complaint from a liberal advocacy group, the American Democracy Legal Fund, which asked the FEC to look into media reports about links between the rifle association and Russian entities, including a banker with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin…
The preliminary investigation focuses on issues similar to those raised recently by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, as part of his investigation into possible collusion between the NRA, the Trump campaign and Russia…
“I am specifically troubled by the possibility that Russian-backed shell companies or intermediaries may have circumvented laws designed to prohibit foreign meddling in our elections by abusing the rules governing … tax exempt organizations,” Wyden wrote.
In response to that letter, an attorney for the NRA told the senator’s aides that the group was already “answering questions about possible Russian donations as part of an FEC inquiry,” according to a statement from Wyden’s office.
Splinter: Don’t Let the Russia Story Obscure the Campaign Finance Reform We So Desperately Need
By Libby Watson
With the focus on Russia, the FEC (and those in Congress pressuring the agency to act) is missing the bigger problem: It’s way, way too easy to spend a lot of money on elections without anyone knowing you’re doing it. How much worse is it for a foreign government to seek to influence U.S. elections than a billionaire whose only goal is to enrich himself-to the detriment of the United States as a whole-and to further insulate himself and his ultra-wealthy class cohort from any sort of accountability or justice from the government? A billionaire who, by definition, has far greater ability to influence the democratic process than the average voter?
The question of foreign influence is significant because we think foreign governments shouldn’t get to influence our elections, which is fair and true. But what about American billionaires?
Congress
Bloomberg: Facebook, Twitter, Google CEOs Face Calls to Testify to Congress
By Steven T. Dennis
Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said that the chief executives from companies like Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google should testify as to how they can tackle ongoing interference by Russia, as well as abuse of their networks by others.
“This is not a problem that’s going to be swept under the rug or is going to go away,” Warner said in an interview Wednesday. “If anything, it’s increasing.”
And Warner, who met with Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook at the Capitol on Tuesday, said it’s not enough for the companies to send lower level staffers.
“I don’t want to hear from the lawyers,” he said. “The CEOs owe an obligation.”…
Another committee that could be interested in the tech companies is the Senate Rules Committee, which has jurisdiction over legislation proposed by Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, John McCain and Warner requiring public disclosure on online political ads.
Klobuchar, who on Wednesday called Federal Election Commission proposals that called for stricter disclosure for online political ads too narrow, wants the CEOs, who have not embraced her proposal, to testify. “I think that would be enlightening,” she said.
USA Today: Will new Facebook scandal finally force tech CEOs to testify on ‘information warfare’?
By Roger McNamee, Norman Eisen and Fred Wertheimer
Russia never would have been able to conduct “information warfare” against the United States in the way it did in the 2016 presidential election without Facebook, Twitter and Google. The latest allegations – that a Trump campaign consulting firm with Russian connections used improperly obtained Facebook data on tens of millions of Americans to target voters – raise disturbing questions about the roles of both Facebook and Russia…
Congress must require testimony under oath from Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, CEO Larry Page of Alphabet (Google’s parent company), and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. They need to tell the American public what they are doing to prevent bad actors or foreign adversaries from invading their platforms and our future elections.
We need information that only the three major tech companies can provide to fight these insidious attacks on our national security and on our constitutional system. We need to know, for starters, whether any of these companies or their employees knew or suspected what Russia was doing in the 2016 presidential election, and, if so, what they did with this information.
We need to see all the data these companies have related to Russian use of their platforms to intervene in our elections.
Center for Responsive Politics: Sunshine Week: A look ahead
As Sunshine Week ends, we take a look at some federal legislation seeking greater transparency. Here are three things to keep an eye on…
Introduced in October, the HONEST Ads Act would bring greater transparency to the burgeoning field of online political ads.
Under the Senate bill (S. 1989), online platforms such as Google, Facebook and Twitter would be required to release information about the buyers and targets of online political ads as well as preserve the ads and make them publicly available. A companion bill was introduced in the House (H.R. 4077)…
Senators are not required to file campaign finance reports electronically with the FEC. The Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act would change that by bringing the upper chamber into the 21st Century…
The money raised and spent by Trump’s inaugural committee set records and included some untraceable “dark money” funding based on our analysis of its IRS filing.
A bill introduced last month by Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.)- the Presidential Inaugural Committee Oversight Act – is a first step toward improving transparency of the funding and spending for presidential inaugurations.
Internet Speech
Reason: 5 Reasons Not to Feed the Russian Troll Hysteria
By Jacob Sullum and Paul Detrick
According to the indictment, Russian trolls associated with the so-called Internet Research Agency (IRA) in Saint Petersburg spent “thousands of U.S. dollars every month” on social media ads, which is a minuscule fraction of online ad revenue…
Russian trolls supposedly had the Machiavellian know-how to infiltrate the American political system, but their social media posts don’t look very sophisticated. The posts often featured broken English and puzzling topic choices…
Broken English aside, the social media posts were not qualitatively different from content created by American activists, and they seemed to be aimed mainly at reinforcing pre-existing beliefs and divisions. The Russians might have gotten a few Trump supporters to show up at anti-Clinton rallies, but that does not mean they had an impact on the election…
The Justice Department describes the messages posted by Russians pretending to be Americans as “information warfare.” But while the posts may have been sophomoric, inaccurate, and illogical, that does not distinguish them from most of what passes for online political discussion among actual Americans. The integrity of civic discourse does not depend on verifying the citizenship of people who participate in it. It depends on the ability to weigh what they say, checking it against our own values and information from other sources. If voters cannot do that, maybe democracy is doomed. But if so, it’s not the Russians’ fault.
Political Advertising
Forbes: The Problem Isn’t Cambridge Analytica: It’s Facebook
By Kalev Leetaru
Cambridge Analytica garnered headlines across the world on Friday as Facebook formally suspended the company from its platform over allegations that it had improperly received and retained data on tens of millions of Facebook users from an academic researcher that had originally obtained the data legally and properly in accordance with previous Facebook developer guidelines. However, whether or not the allegations are true (the company has denied them), the singular focus on Cambridge Analytica makes for a simple meme-worthy media narrative, but the reality is that what the company stands accused of by Facebook is in fact what academic researchers, commercial enterprises, governments and even the social media companies themselves do every day with the data entrusted to them by a quarter of the earth’s population.
New York Times: How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions
By Matthew Rosenberg, Nicholas Confessore, and Carole Cadwalladr
In the United States, Mr. Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, a board member, Mr. Bannon and Mr. Nix received warnings from their lawyer that it was illegal to employ foreigners in political campaigns, according to company documents and former employees.
Congressional investigators have questioned Mr. Nix about the company’s role in the Trump campaign. And the Justice Department’s special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has demanded the emails of Cambridge Analytica employees who worked for the Trump team as part of his investigation into Russian interference in the election.
While the substance of Mr. Mueller’s interest is a closely guarded secret, documents viewed by The Times indicate that the firm’s British affiliate claims to have worked in Russia and Ukraine…
The documents also raise new questions about Facebook, which is already grappling with intense criticism over the spread of Russian propaganda and fake news…
Whether the company’s American ventures violated election laws would depend on foreign employees’ roles in each campaign, and on whether their work counted as strategic advice under Federal Election Commission rules.
Candidates and Campaigns
PolitiFact: Conor Lamb’s rejection of corporate PAC money needs context
By Colin Deppen
“He mainly received money from labor PACs and Democratic leadership PACs,” said Andrew Mayersohn, a committees researcher with the Center for Responsive Politics.
“Labor PACs, obviously, don’t receive money from corporate PACs. Leadership PACs do (usually) take corporate PAC contributions, but I doubt that Lamb will feel indebted to Comcast just because Comcast’s PAC gave to [U.S. Rep] Mike Doyle’s leadership PAC last year, and Doyle gave to Lamb’s campaign this year. More likely, he’ll feel indebted to Mike Doyle,” Mayersohn said…
“We group those [individual] contributions with corporate PACs when we talk about industry giving. For example, PNC Bank’s PAC and PNC executives are ultimately part of the financial industry’s political influence,” Mayersohn said of OpenSecret.org’s lists of top PAC donors.
“Since most people work for a corporation of some kind, it’s pretty hard for a campaign to avoid taking contributions from ‘corporate employees or owners.’ Lamb received some contributions from PNC employees, but would not have accepted money from their PAC (if asked).” …
While some argue that the shunning of corporate PACs by political candidates is largely an empty gesture, groups like End Citizens United tout the Lamb campaign’s lack of corporate PAC donors as a breath of fresh air.
