The Courts
Goldwater Institute: High School Censors Student Who Showed Support for Donald Trump
An 18-year-old Florida high school senior has had his freedom of speech taken away after coming to school with a “TRUMP” elephant statue in the bed of his pickup truck. Today, the Goldwater Institute filed a lawsuit in defense of his First Amendment rights and to ensure that all students have the freedom to take part in political speech.
PennLive: Pro-Trump teen suspended for wearing clothing with political slogans sues her Pa. school district
By Matt Miller
A high school sophomore who says she was suspended when she wore a “Women for Trump” mask and a pro-Trump T-shirt to school claims her central Pennsylvania school district is violating her civil rights.
Morgan Earnest claims in a newly filed federal lawsuit that her free speech rights were breached when Mifflin County School District officials gave her the choice of hiding her Trump endorsement garb or being punished.
Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): Sharp Criticism + Doxing of State Narcotics Agency Isn’t Punishable True Threat
By Eugene Volokh
From United States v. Cook, decided July 13 by Judge Michael P. Mills:
Congress
SCOTUSblog: Barrett nomination moves to Senate floor
By Amy Howe
Judge Amy Coney Barrett moved one step closer to becoming Justice Amy Coney Barrett on Thursday. In a hearing that Democratic senators boycotted, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to send Barrett’s nomination to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the floor. The full Senate, where Republicans hold a majority, is expected to vote on Monday on Barrett’s nomination.
Wall Street Journal: Senate Judiciary Committee Authorizes Subpoenas for Twitter and Facebook CEOs
By Siobhan Hughes and Sarah E. Needleman
The Senate Judiciary Committee authorized its chairman to issue subpoenas to the chief executives of Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc., after the companies limited sharing of New York Post articles regarding the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
The Republican-led panel voted 12-0 to authorize Chairman Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) to issue subpoenas to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.
The vote will “hopefully give us some leverage to secure their testimony,” Mr. Graham said.
Congress typically negotiates with companies to secure voluntary testimony at hearings, opting for subpoenas only if executives resist. No date has been set for a Judiciary Committee hearing.
State Department
Politico: U.S. weighs labeling leading human rights groups ‘anti-Semitic’
By Nahal Toosi
The Trump administration is considering declaring that several prominent international NGOs – including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam – are anti-Semitic and that governments should not support them, two people familiar with the issue said.
The proposed declaration could come from the State Department as soon as this week…
But the proposal is drawing opposition from career State Department employees. Among the opponents are department lawyers who warn that it is on shaky grounds due to free speech concerns, could lead to lawsuits and might even lack a proper administrative legal basis.
Independent Groups
Wall Street Journal: Inside the Left’s Web of ‘Dark Money’
By Scott Walter
By law, a nonprofit need not reveal its donors, and very few do. But a normal nonprofit, like [Sen. Sheldon] Whitehouse’s targets, must disclose revenues, assets, board members, salaries, largest vendors, total expenses, lobbying, grants to other nonprofits and much more.
The Arabella empire avoids those disclosures. Imagine a pyramid with Arabella Advisors at the apex. Arabella is a for-profit entity and thus has no disclosure obligations. The middle layer is four nonprofits. At the base are hundreds of projects, fiscally sponsored by the four nonprofits, that make up the supposedly grass-roots groups the public sees. These projects fight all sorts of political battles, from judicial nominations and climate policy to abortion and ObamaCare. Their financial backers include some of the wealthiest liberal philanthropies, including Bill Gates’s and Warren Buffett’s family foundations.
But these hundreds of projects reveal neither their donors nor any details a genuine nonprofit must disclose. Nor can you try to pressure their board members, because they don’t have any. Each is merely a website and an accounting code at one of the four umbrella nonprofits in the middle of the pyramid: “pop-up” groups that often exist while useful and then disappear. Although the four umbrella nonprofits file the usual disclosures, each one amalgamates data from dozens of pop-up groups, which obscures the details of any particular project.
Center for Responsive Politics: Senate GOP ‘dark money’ group passing millions to super PAC, avoiding disclosure
By Anna Massoglia
While dark money groups funding closely-tied super PACs is not a new tactic, the 2020 election cycle has seen a rise in contributions from these opaque sources reported by liberal and conservative groups alike.
This means super PACs and other outside spending groups that are legally required to disclose their donors can still hide the ultimate source of their funding. Super PACs and other political groups have taken more than $200 million in contributions from opaque entities that don’t disclose their donors during the 2020 election cycle, a new record for the amount of dark money flowing into federal races through contributions to political committees like super PACs.
Politico: Bloomberg knocks Trump back on his heels in Florida
By Marc Caputo and David Siders
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s $100 million investment in Florida to defeat Donald Trump is recasting the presidential contest in the president’s must-win state, forcing his campaign to spend big to shore up his position and freeing up Democratic cash to expand the electoral map elsewhere.
Bloomberg’s massive advertising and ground-game spending, which began roughly a month ago, has thrown Trump into a defensive crouch across the arc of Sunbelt states. As a result, the president’s campaign has scaled back its TV ad buys in crucial Northern swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan – a vacuum being filled by a constellation of outside political groups backing Joe Biden.
First Amendment
Chicago Tribune: Chicago 7 prosecutor: ‘They were going to try to destroy our trial. And they did a damn good job.’
By Jason Meisner
[Former federal prosecutor Dick] Schultz, 82, is the last living attorney from either side of the Chicago 7 trial, in which political activists were accused of conspiring to incite riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
The Chicago 7 case drew national attention and exposed the depths of the country’s divisions over the Vietnam War and civil rights as well as the fairness of the criminal justice system…
The circuslike atmosphere of the trial…has been given big-budget movie treatment in “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” written and directed by Aaron Sorkin and now streaming on Netflix.
Schultz, who is portrayed in the film by actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, says he enjoyed some aspects of Sorkin’s Hollywood take, but that it ultimately “didn’t touch on what really happened.”
“Everything was so exaggerated, you would think the judge was conducting a trial in the Soviet Union,” he said. He also thought that he was falsely portrayed as somehow embarrassed by the whole prosecution when in reality, “it was precisely the opposite.”
Online Speech Platforms
Jonathan Turley: The Rise of The Corporate Censors: How America Is Drifting Toward The Chinese Model Of Media
Facebook and Twitter have now made the case against themselves for stripping social media companies of [Section 230] immunity. That would be a huge loss not only to these companies but to free speech as well. We would lose the greatest single advance in free speech via an unregulated internet.
At the same time, we are seeing a rejection of journalistic objectivity in favor of activism.
Candidates and Campaigns
Politico: Trump’s cash woes mount as Biden laps him
By Elena Schneider and Zach Montellaro
Back in early September, Trump weighed spending as much as $100 million of his own money on his reelection bid, according to Bloomberg News. When asked by reporters if he planned to self-fund part of his run, Trump said, “If I have to, I would.”
But the money has not materialized. Trump has contributed just over $8,000 to his campaign this election cycle, according to FEC data. It’s a huge difference from 2016, when Trump contributed $66 million of his own money to his first presidential bid.
The States
Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): “Fake News”: Preventing Falsehoods in Candidate Statements in Ballot Pamphlets
By Eugene Volokh
From Chief Justice Debra Stephens’ majority in Reykdal v. Espinoza, decided today by the Washington Supreme Court:
Incumbent Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal sued to have the Thurston County Superior Court order the removal of one allegedly defamatory line in the voters’ guide pamphlet from challenger Maia Espinoza’s candidate statement. The superior court agreed that there was a substantial likelihood Reykdal could succeed in a defamation suit based on Espinoza’s statement. Using a supervisory power conferred by [Washington Code §] 29A.32.090(3)(b), [which authorizes the removal of statements that are very likely libelous,] the superior court ordered the secretary of state to edit out the offending line….
Casper Star-Tribune: Gun rights group challenges secretary of state ruling to disclose donors
By Nick Reynolds
An attorney for the Second Amendment group Wyoming Gun Owners is challenging a ruling by the Wyoming Secretary of State to disclose the organization’s donors, arguing the ruling is an attempt to stifle political speech.
In a Wednesday letter to the state elections division, lawyer Stephen Klein called on the office to dismiss the complaint filed against the gun rights group. The complaint alleged Wyoming Gun Owners ran a series of attack ads against Republican candidates in the past year despite not being registered with the Wyoming Secretary of State’s office as required by election code…
The exhibits included several fundraising emails disparaging numerous candidates around Wyoming, photocopies of a political mailer boosting Sen. Anthony Bouchard – who founded the organization more than a decade ago – in his primary bid against Johnson, and an audio recording of a radio advertisement also boosting Bouchard and his voting record…
Klein, however, argues that because the organization never explicitly endorsed Bouchard or any other candidate, the advertisements it produced were in compliance with Wyoming campaign finance law, which broadly defines electioneering communications as any advertisement that clearly defines a candidate, “does not expressly advocate the nomination, election or defeat of the candidate,” or “can only be reasonably interpreted as an appeal to vote for or against” a candidate, among numerous other provisions.
The Post and Courier: Editorial: Charleston Coalition for Kids needs to come clean with the public
By The Editorial Staff
Unlike 47 other states, South Carolina doesn’t require outside groups that spend money to influence our votes to tell us anything about who they are or what they’re doing.
Yet year after year, our Legislature refuses to require them to report where they get the money, arguing ridiculously that the U.S. Constitution requires lawmakers to let them spend as much money as they want, as anonymously as they want, to try to manipulate our votes…
In the infamous 2010 Citizens United v. FEC ruling striking down limits on third-party expenditures, the high court said there’s no need to worry that unlimited election spending will create corruption precisely because the spending is reported. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in another case that same year: “Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed.”
Closing the dark-money loophole needs to be at the top of the Legislature’s agenda next year.
Courthouse News: California Bill Seeks DA Independence From Police Union Money
By Martin Macias Jr.
Under a California bill announced Thursday, elected district attorneys in the state will be required to recuse themselves from investigating and prosecuting excessive force and fatal shootings by police when the prosecutor has taken campaign contributions from the officer’s labor union or association.
