CCP
Statement on Center for Competitive Politics v. Harris
“We are very disappointed that the Supreme Court decided not to review the 9th Circuit’s decision. The case is not over and we will study our legal options before making our next move,” said CCP President David Keating. “It is possible, for example, that the Court did not want to review the denial of a preliminary injunction and will decide to hear the case after the lower courts have ruled on the merits of the case.”
“We call on Attorney General Kamala Harris to end this failed policy. Last week, it was revealed that over 1,400 supposedly confidential forms listing donors appeared on the state’s website.”
“When the Attorney General’s head auditor was asked under oath how many times in the last 10 years the confidential information sought was ‘the reason [you] kicked off [an] investigation’ of a charity, he said ‘I don’t believe any of them.’ The office doesn’t need this information and has demonstrated its inability to keep these forms confidential. It’s time to end this anti-association policy permanently.”
In the News
WIBA Madison Radio: Interview with Eric Wang
CCP Senior Fellow Eric Wang is interviewed by Vicki McKenna about new legislation in Wisconsin, and the effect of campaign regulations on free speech.
Sacramento Bee: High court won’t hear challenge over nonprofit donor lists
Associated Press
The justices on Monday let stand a lower court ruling that said the state has a right to review donor lists to determine whether a group is actually involved in charitable activities.
The conservative Center for Competitive Politics argued that the review violates donors’ right to privacy and freedom of association under the First Amendment.
A federal appeals court rejected the group’s challenge in May, finding there was no indication the state was trying to harass donors or discourage them from contributing.
Independent Groups
New York Times: Jeb Bush Allies Threaten Wave of Harsh Attacks on Marco Rubio, an Ex-Mentee
Maggie Haberman and Michael Barbaro
And the group’s chief strategist has boasted of his willingness to spend as much as $20 million to damage Mr. Rubio’s reputation and halt his sudden ascent in the polls, according to three people told of the claim.
Seething with anger and alarmed over Mr. Rubio’s rise, aides to Mr. Bush, the former Florida governor, and his allies are privately threatening a wave of scathing attacks on his former protégé in the coming weeks, in a sign of just how anxious they have become about the state of Mr. Bush’s candidacy.
Daily Caller: Super PAC Working To Track Down Ben Carson’s Former Patients
Alex Pappas
In a Sunday evening email with the subject “Are you a former patient of Dr. Carson?” to supporters, John Philip Sousa IV of The 2016 Committee wrote: “If you are a former patient of Ben Carson and are willing to appear in an ad and/or video promoting his candidacy, please respond immediately.”
“The liberal media and powerful political establishment are doing everything they can to undermine Dr. Carson’s integrity,” Sousa wrote. “They take innocent comments and misrepresent or misinterpret them; then claim Ben Carson isn’t honest. It’s preposterous. But we’re committed to staying positive and telling America about the ways Dr. Carson has saved lives.”
Citizens United
More Soft Money Hard Law: Justice Kennedy at Harvard
Bob Bauer
If Justice Kennedy was right about this, then what about the results are unhappy? The full explanation cannot be the weakness of disclosure, because the expenditures his opinion authorizes, independent expenditures, are disclosed. The adjustment he would like to see, faster disclosure, is hardly a major one in the constitutional scheme of things.
Yet the Justice is uncomfortable. He hears, and he reads, that things are not going well. The large quantities of money coursing through the political system make him uneasy, as it does others. The more concrete significance of this spending for constitutional or public policy analysis presents the harder question that the Justice struggled to answer at Harvard.
IRS
Hot Air: Tim Scott suggests we might repair the IRS by getting the unions out of there
Jazz Shaw
It’s a bold shot across the bow at both union corruption and the leadership of the department which still seems to be mired in Lerner’s legacy. It’s also not entirely without precedent. Under Title VII of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, some agencies such as the FBI and CIA are forbidden to unionize, with other provisions put in to ensure their far treatment as employees. That was an important feature of the legislation because even if the authors didn’t specifically define it as such, they may have recognized that justice needs to indeed be blind to politics and the presence of the union could unduly influence their work, either by ignoring the sins of their friends or inventing some new ones out of whole cloth for their political opponents.
Scott’s proposal would amend the act to add the IRS to the list. At the time it was written I suppose our elected officials didn’t imagine anyone going so far as to try to use the tax collection agency for political purposes, but reality has surely intruded on that pleasant vision by now.
Supreme Court
Reuters: Labor union dissenters influence political speech more than shareholders: law profs to SCOTUS
Alison Frankel
That’s going to change, at least a little, later this term when the Supreme Court hears Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. As the merits brief from Rebecca Friedrichs and several of her fellow California teachers and school administrators explains, state law requires that public school educators either join the union or pay “agency fees” they contend are roughly the equivalent of union dues. Friedrichs and the other plaintiffs, represented by Jones Day and counsel of record Peter Fagen of Fagen Friedman & Fulfrost, contend that the law requires them to subsidize the union’s political pronouncements, in which their brief calls “the largest regime of compelled political speech in the nation.” They want the Supreme Court to hold that the First Amendment prohibits agency fees or, at the very least, prohibits fees used for political speech unless non-union members explicitly authorize that spending.
Free Speech
Reason: University of Missouri President Just Resigned: What It Means for the Campus Speech Wars
Robert Soave
This controversy, as with the current upheaval at Yale, suggests aggrieved students most desperately want administrators to acknowledge their pain and tell them they have a right to live free of emotional turmoil. But no competent administrator can provide them with this false sense of security, since the proper role of a university education is to help students overcome (rather than sidestep) challenges.
In any case, Wolfe’s resignation also means that hyper-offended students are not as powerless as skeptics of the campus speech wars claim they are. I’m often told by these skeptics that the actions of outraged students are harmless because they never amount to anything, but this development at Missouri is a significant contrary example.
Candidates and Campaigns
Huffington Post: Why Donald Trump Is Terrible for Campaign Finance Reform
Geng Ngarmboonanant
In what world does allowing the ultra-rich to self-finance their campaign — giving billionaires a leg up in entering the race and sustaining their candidacy — make the electoral process fairer? While one of campaign finance’s aims is to fight corruption of individual candidates by big money, another aim is to avoid corruption of the system as a whole. Even if we believe that self-funded campaigns are less prone to quid pro quo transactions between candidate and donor, surely a system where billionaire politicians hold extraordinary advantages over regular politicians is just as corrupt.
Politico: Bernie Sanders leaves money on the table
Gabriel Debenedetti
Meanwhile, the Vermonter’s lack of interest in the region’s cash is a phenomenon that jibes with his campaign’s singular focus on Iowa and New Hampshire this fall. But by not sending emissaries — and not even stopping by the San Francisco area for one of his signature megarallies — the insurgent Vermont senator is missing out on potentially millions of dollars.
“I heard nothing from him or his people” before or after he announced his campaign, said another top Silicon Valley fundraiser who aligned with Obama in 2008 and eventually joined the Clinton team. Some pockets of Northern California would be natural ideological fits for Sanders, the fundraiser mused — if only he took the time to court them.
National Journal: Is Ad Blocker Going to Ruin $1 Billion Worth of Presidential Campaign Ads?
Zach Montellaro
For campaigns, the prevalence of this software raises a troubling prospect: What if they’re spending big on Web ads to reach a certain audience, but that audience is automatically tuning them out? And for websites and ad makers looking to cash in on those ad-buys, it creates a challenge: How do they convince buyers to pay for space on their sites knowing that some users will be able to filter it out entirely?
