New from the Institute for Free Speech
By Alex Cordell
State Senator David Farnsworth recently introduced legislation (S.B. 1032) that would ban advertisements on billboards along state roads for any drug that is illegal under federal law, including marijuana…
Farnsworth conceded his legislation could not ban billboards specifically urging people to vote for or against a ballot proposition that would fully legalize marijuana…
[W]hile the Senator appears to recognize the dangers of stifling “legitimate political speech,” his proposal threatens to do so anyway. Valuable speech about issues comes in more forms than just explicit calls to vote for or against ballot measures or candidates.
For instance, a sign placed by an advocacy group presenting statistics on the decreased number of incarcerated people or the increased revenue to use for public works projects from states that have legalized the substance could encourage someone who was previously apathetic on the subject to do their own research. After seeking more information, that individual can come to their own conclusion about whether they agree with the message in the original ad. On the other hand, if someone sees the ad and is upset by its content, they have the ability to speak out on their own or join with others who harbor similar feelings to dispute the claims being made and put forth their own ideas.
Donor Privacy
People United for Privacy: Under Attack: Donors Right to Privacy (Video)
Donors to non-profit organizations have traditionally had a right to privacy. But today, this right is under attack.
[Featuring Institute for Free Speech Chairman Bradley A. Smith.]
IRS
Washington Post: Fallout from allegations of tea party targeting hamper IRS oversight of nonprofits
By Robert O’Harrow Jr.
Under the federal tax code, charities may not directly or indirectly support a political candidate, but they are allowed to participate in educational debates about the issues. Other nonprofits known as social welfare groups may be involved in politics, but only as long as it is not their primary purpose.
The main part of government tasked with policing those lines, the IRS’s Exempt Organizations division, has seen its budget decline from a peak of $102 million in 2011 to $82 million last year.
At the same time, division employees have fallen from 889 to 642.
The division now lacks expertise, resources and the will needed to effectively oversee more than 1.2 million charities and tens of thousands of social welfare groups, according to interviews with two dozen nonprofit specialists and current and former IRS officials…
In an interview before he stepped down in November, then-IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told The Washington Post that the division is still enforcing the tax code and pursuing audits and examinations. But he acknowledged the effect of the budget cuts.
“The Exempt Organizations division, along with the entire IRS, is hampered significantly in its operations,” he said.
FEC
Slate: Political Ads on Facebook Now Need to Say Who Paid For Them
By April Glaser
The Federal Election Commission determined that political ads with images or videos posted on Facebook now have to include disclaimers about who paid for them. It was the first time the FEC had clarified its federal rules for posting political ads on Facebook in six years…
The FEC’s decision was sparked by an inquiry sent by a conservative political group called the Take Back Action Fund, which asked whether the Facebook ads that it plans to run in the next election cycle should include a disclaimer about who paid for them…
As it became clear that a crackdown was coming, the Internet Association-another lobbying group whose members include Facebook and Google-suggested in a letter last Thursday that a link to a landing page of the group that paid for the ad, instead of putting the information on that ad itself, would suffice. But clearly the FEC didn’t agree…
Last month, after receiving more than 150,000 comments about whether it should start a process to update its political ad disclaimer requirements, the FEC said it would begin to draft a new proposal.
Wisconsin John Doe
Daily Signal: The State Government Agency That Spied on Citizens
By Hans von Spakovsky
The 88-page report by Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel details the notorious “John Doe” investigations that went after almost every conservative, nonprofit organization in Wisconsin (the state chapter of Club for Growth among them) for supposed violations of campaign finance laws.
Except that there were not any actual violations of the law, according to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The court shut down the prosecutions in 2015, calling the legal theory under which the prosecutors were pursuing the case “unsupported in either reason or law.” …
Here is the meritless theory behind the investigations: Any support for issues important to Gov. Scott Walker, such as the bill reducing union power over state government employees, was illegal “coordination.”
As the state Supreme Court said, however, our democracy is supposed to assure the “unfettered interchange of ideas for the bringing about of political and social changes desired by the people.” Instead, the prosecutors’ theories “would assure that such political speech will be investigated with paramilitary-style home invasions conducted in the pre-dawn hours and then prosecuted and punished.”
These investigations tried to criminalize political speech and political activity protected by the First Amendment.
Citizens United
Capital Research Center: Liberal Groups Benefited Most After Citizens United Decision
The Capital Research Center (CRC) released a study on the controversial 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, detailing the flow of funding to liberal and conservative political campaigns, outside groups, and traditional public policy organizations before and after the ruling. It includes a comprehensive look at pre- and post-Citizens Unitedpolitical donations and spending. Among other findings, the study concludes that support for left-wing public policy nonprofits appears to have substantially increased after the ruling: they received a whopping $7.4 billion in 2014-compared to $2.2 billion for their conservative counterparts.
You can read the study here.
CRC also produced a video highlighting the study’s findings. The video, which you can see here, argues that overall, Republicans and conservative organizations have not come to dominate U.S. elections and public discourse with greater funding windfalls, as many liberals predicted after the Court’s decision…
On January 31st, CRC will host a panel discussion on the issue of conservative and liberal funding flows with experts in campaign finance and nonprofit spending.
Internet Speech
Wall Street Journal: The Google-Facebook Duopoly Threatens Diversity of Thought
By Mark Epstein
In a November speech, Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, argued that “edge providers” like social-media websites and search engines “routinely block or discriminate against content they don’t like.” Mr. Pai cited YouTube’s decision to place age restrictions on and pull ads from videos by conservative commentator Dennis Prager’s Prager University, including a video by Alan Dershowitz on Israel’s founding.
He also pointed to Twitter’s suspension of a pro-life campaign ad from Rep. Marsha Blackburn, an action that would have been illegal if done by a TV or radio station. Twitter has refused sponsored tweets from immigration opponents, saying its hate-speech policy is triggered by messages such as “the fiscal cost created by illegal immigrants of $746.3b compares to total a cost of deportation of $124.1b.” …
One political blog that posted an article trying to distinguish the “alt-right” from white nationalism received a warning email from Google’s AdSense team. An editor took the article down, explaining to readers that the blog “needs revenue from the Google ad platform in order to survive.” You needn’t agree with the editorial decision to publish the article to be troubled by Google’s vetoing it.
USA Today: #TwitterPurge begins as company suspends accounts deemed hateful, violent
By Trevor Hughes
As a private company, Twitter has the legal right to block any speech it wants, since the First Amendment only applies to government control of speech. But for years, Twitter billed itself as the “free speech wing of the free speech party,” exerting little control over its legions of anonymous users.
Under pressure to jumpstart stagnant user growth, the San Francisco-based company has recently taken a more restrictive approach as it tries to address years of complaints about rampant harassment, which in turn drives many users away.
Twitter says the suspensions – some are temporary and some are permanent – will help make the social-media platform better for the vast majority of its 330 million monthly active users.
“While we want people to feel free to share media that reflects their creativity or individuality, or to show what’s happening in the world, we will take action when it crosses the line into abuse towards a person, group, or protected category,” the company said…
Users who protest the suspension can appeal. “In our efforts to be more aggressive here, we may make some mistakes,” Twitter said in a statement Monday.
Candidates and Campaigns
McClatchy DC: Surge in out-of-state donors fuels Dems in special elections
By Ben Wieder and Alex Roarty
Hundreds of newly energized donors – many of them big-money players – are fueling Democratic campaigns and providing the financial muscle behind the liberal “Resistance” against Trump.
According to a McClatchy analysis of 2017 campaign finance records, more than 1,300 donors gave to each of the Democratic candidates in two of the highest profile special elections in the year: Doug Jones, who defeated Republican Roy Moore last week in an Alabama Senate race, and Jon Ossoff, the Georgia Democrat who narrowly lost a House election in June. By comparison, the Republicans in those races had only 60 donors in common.
Those Democratic donors – 98 percent of whom were from out-of-state – accounted for more than $800,000 of the donations Jones received, or more than 15 percent of the $5 million in itemized donations he reported on his most recent filing, which covers 2017 through Nov. 22. (More than half of that amount came in the first three weeks of November, so the total amount given – and the list of donors who backed both Jones and Ossoff – will likely grow when final fundraising numbers for the Alabama contest are released next month.)…
The two campaigns share more donors in common than any campaigns did in either the 2014 or 2010 midterm elections, McClatchy’s analysis found.
The Intercept: Jill Stein Will Hand Over Russia-Related Communications to Senate Committee
By Sam Biddle
In her first comments to the press, former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein said she will cooperate fully with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into “collusion with the Russians” during the 2016 campaign, and is currently searching for relevant documents. Stein denies holding any substantive communications with the Russian government or RT, its state-owned media property.
Stein says her involvement in the inquiry, first reported by BuzzFeed News, came as a surprise when her campaign was first contacted last month. After a subsequent dialogue between attorneys representing Stein and lawyers from the Senate Intelligence Committee, the former candidate received a formal request for cooperation. Although she says the possibility of testifying before Congress has not yet been broached, Stein says she would be “happy to do so” if asked.
Still, Stein clearly resents the Senate’s attention vis-à-vis electoral interference and foreign meddling: “This smacks of the dangerous underbelly of these investigations. The extent to which they exercise overreach, politicizing, and sensationalism is a danger to democracy, especially in the current climate of all-out war on our First Amendment rights. This is not a time to be attacking the rights of political speech and political association.”
