Congress

NBC News: Senate to vote on sweeping voting rights bill Republicans promise to filibuster

By Sahil Kapur

This week could be the last dance for federal voting rights legislation.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is moving Monday to set up a vote on the Freedom to Vote Act, which is likely to take place Wednesday…

The bill doesn’t have the 60 votes it needs to overcome a guaranteed Republican filibuster, meaning it will die unless Democrats nuke the filibuster. They don’t have the 50 votes for that, and they’d need something close to a miracle to get them.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has promised that the measure “will go nowhere,” labeling it a “partisan power grab” to “micromanage elections across America.”

He said it was a product of “far-left hysteria about our democracy.”

Free Speech

Fox News: US Commission on Civil Rights members blast AG Garland for memo on parents protesting school boards

By Kyle Morris

Four out of the eight members of the U.S Commission on Civil Rights have penned a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, chastising him for his recent memo regarding parents who protest school boards.

“We write to express our concerns regarding a recent memorandum issued by your office,” the four members wrote in the letter, questioning Garland’s motive for issuing the memo which instructed the FBI to take the lead on a task force to address threats against school officials, including creating a centralized way to report such threats.

The members who signed onto the letter include Commissioners Peter Kirsanow, J. Christian Adams, Gail Heriot, and Stephen Gilchrist.

“Your memorandum did not cite any specific examples of ‘harassment, intimidation and threats of violence’ that would provide any basis for law enforcement action by the Department,” the letter read. “We are concerned that much of what the NSBA calls threats and acts of intimidation—and compares to “domestic terrorism and hate crimes”—can be merely classified as political speech.”

Wall Street Journal: Alumni Unite For Freedom Of Speech

By Stuart Taylor Jr. and Edward Yingling

Readers of these pages are well aware that free speech, academic freedom and viewpoint diversity are in big trouble at U.S. universities. But many of those worried over the state of campuses are almost resigned to the idea that the forces of illiberal intolerance have won. The fight is far from over. On Oct. 18, five alumni groups are announcing the creation of an organization to stand up for open inquiry: the Alumni Free Speech Alliance.

AFSA’s founders are groups of graduates of Cornell University, Davidson College, Princeton University (our alma mater), the University of Virginia, and Washington and Lee University. Our allied organizations are the Cornell Free Speech Alliance, Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse, Princetonians for Free Speech, the Jefferson Council (composed of UVA alumni) and the Generals Redoubt (W&L alumni).

AFSA’s member groups are nonpartisan and will protect the rights of faculty and students across the ideological spectrum. The groups will pool ideas and information as well as promote and mentor similar groups of alumni from other schools. Our goal is to ally with scores of as-yet-unformed alumni groups around the country.

Internet Speech Regulation

National Review: Conservatives Should Support Section 230 Reform

By Nate Hochman

A true free-market solution to Big Tech, consistent with the hands-off approach that conservatives like [Andrew McCarthy] McCarthy and [Sen. Rand] Paul desire, would involve narrowing Section 230’s liability protections or even repealing the provision altogether. Those are measures that libertarian organizations such as the Mises Institute have endorsed, reasoning that such reforms “would actually reduce government intervention” rather than expand it. But if one disagrees with that approach, as many do…the next-best option is the kind of common-carrier designation that has been applied to communications mediums in the past. Far from expanding government power, such a reform would secure a wider sphere of political liberty against the censorious encroachment of a state-sanctioned actor. And it would be entirely consistent with first principles. Republicans should act accordingly.

Candidates and Campaigns

New York Times: Money Floods the Race for Control of Congress, More Than a Year Early

By Shane Goldmacher

Money alone is rarely decisive in political races, especially when both parties are flush with cash. But the glut of political funding, detailed in Federal Election Commission reports filed on Friday by House and Senate candidates and announced by the parties, shows the growing stakes of American elections, where a single flipped Senate seat can shift trillions of dollars in federal spending.

The country’s increasingly polarized electorate has been hyper-engaged in politics since the Trump era began, and the ease of channeling that energy into donations online is remaking how campaigns are funded. The online donation clearinghouses for the two parties, ActBlue and WinRed, processed a combined total of more than $450 million in the third quarter.

Washington Post: New political ad strategy in Virginia: Promoting news articles in Google search results

By Karina Elwood

Democratic Virginia governor candidate Terry McAuliffe’s campaign is using Google ads to promote articles from news organizations, but swapping the original headlines on the search results page with ones they wrote themselves — a novel political advertising method.

The Google ads purchased by McAuliffe’s campaign feature links to news and opinion articles about his Republican opponent Glenn Youngkin from Axios and The Washington Post. The ads show up at the top of search results for keywords like “Glenn Youngkin,” and include a disclosure that they are advertisements, as well as an additional tag required for political advertisements that indicate they’re paid for by the McAuliffe campaign.

But the ad includes titles written by the campaign, which are subtly different from the original search engine headlines written by the publications, and appear in the same format as a headline would appear in a search result…

According to Google, hate speech, extremist content and false claims that could undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process are prohibited in advertisements. But, promoting a news story using political speech, which commonly uses hyperbole, is not prohibited…

Some experts said that while political campaigns have the right to use independent news in their advertisements — as is commonly done in emails, TV spots and news releases — having the power to change the display headline that publishers write could prove to be a problem for media literacy.

The Detroit News: Whitmer’s campaign might have to return excess contributions soon, filing says

By Craig Mauger

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s reelection campaign could have to return or donate $3.4 million in excess contributions it collected outside the state’s normal donor limits as soon as January, according to a new court filing on behalf of Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

The filing came Wednesday in response to the Michigan Republican Party’s lawsuit in federal court, challenging the Democratic governor’s use of a decades-old state policy on recalls to garner large contributions, above the normal $7,150 limit on individual donors, to bolster her reelection war chest.

Lawyers for Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office working on behalf Benson countered that the recall policy wasn’t unfair to GOP candidates for governor because if a recall isn’t called, the excess funds “must be returned” or donated to a local charity or party.

The States

Post Millennial: ACLU backs compelled speech policy in Loudoun County, Virginia

By Libby Emmons

The ACLU filed a brief in opposition to free speech. The American Civil Liberties Union…is fighting against public school teachers who do not believe they should be compelled to ally with views to which they are fundamentally opposed.

The issue is pronouns, and whether teachers should be compelled to use pronouns of a student’s choosing, and the venue is the much maligned school district of Loudoun County, Virginia…

The action prompted journalist Glenn Greenwald to predict the end of the ACLU as it has been, a defender of free speech rights and civil liberties, to become a propagandist arm of the federal government. Greenwald called attention to the impressive decline of the ACLU in The Intercept a year ago, saying “it has also been criticized for abandoning its core identity of being a non-partisan civil liberties group that defends free speech and due process rights of everyone, and instead transforming into a standard liberal activist group.” And the ACLU is just getting worse.

AP News: Removing the %&*@ from Maine’s vanity plates will take time

By David Sharp

Removing the flipping obscenities from license plates on Maine’s roads and highways isn’t going to happen overnight, even though a law banning such profanities in a state where such regulation has been unusually lax goes into effect Monday…

Now, rule-making is getting underway to ensure the law protects First Amendment rights while getting rid of obscene language.

The process, which includes public comment, could take between two to four months, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said.

Requests for so-called vanity license plates that are deemed to be potentially offensive will be on hold in the meantime. Eventually, the state will begin recalling previously issued plates, likely this winter…

A majority of states have restrictions on license plate messages that are considered profane, sexually suggestive, racist, drug related, politically objectionable or religiously offensive.

But Maine became the “wild, wild, wild west of vanity license plates” when the state dropped its review process in 2015. “Our anything-goes approach was unusual,” Bellows said.

As a former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, Bellows understands the importance of the First Amendment protections on free speech. But she acknowledged she didn’t understand the extent of “really disturbing” license plates before she was sworn in as secretary of state earlier this year.