Supreme Court
People United for Privacy: Citizen privacy is an issue that unites Americans
People United for Privacy Foundation has joined a broad coalition of groups that are asking the Supreme Court to overturn California’s requirement that nonprofit organizations disclose their IRS Form 990 Schedule B forms. These forms contain private, sensitive information including the names and addresses of an organization’s major supporters. The State of California claims that it keeps this information confidential, but numerous examples of private information being published on a public website demonstrate that the state does not have the ability to maintain sufficient control over a donor’s personal information…
The amici on this brief are a small representation of the diverse list of organizations that support the challenge to California’s disclosure requirement. Over 280 groups signed 43 amicus briefs in support of the petitioners, representing a wide range of causes and political preferences that includes progressive advocacy groups, conservative think tanks, religious organizations, trade associations, animal and human welfare advocates, educational institutions, community services, and arts and culture organizations.
[Ed. note: The Institute for Free Speech filed an amicus brief in AFPF v. Becerra in support of the petitioners. We also filed a related lawsuit challenging then-Attorney General Kamala Harris’s demand for nonprofit Schedule B information in IFS v. Becerra. Read more about that case here.]
The Courts
By Colin Kalmbacher
The American Civil Liberties Union hopes to undo a Trump and Biden administration effort to sanction and punish international lawyers who are investigating the United States for war crimes. On Friday, the group filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in an ongoing lawsuit challenging the government’s economic sanctions regime against the International Criminal Court.
“Injunctive relief is warranted because the Restrictions are unconstitutional content-based restrictions on [the attorneys’ and law professors’] speech and are ultra vires,” the filing alleges—using the Latin term for an invalid act beyond the powers of the law.
Congress
Newsweek: Sheldon Whitehouse’s Mistaken Crusade Against the Supreme Court
By Ilya Shapiro
This past Wednesday, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Trial Lawyers) held his first hearing as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action and Federal Rights. It won’t be a surprise to anyone following Whitehouse’s career that the hearing was called “What’s Wrong with the Supreme Court: The Big-Money Assault on Our Judiciary.”
The operative framework was that our courts have been “captured” by dark money and that groups who file amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs dance to the tune of corporate donors. But there’s no evidence that judges do anything other than apply the law as they see it. Nor is there any evidence that amicus briefs are driven by donors, rather than donors’ funding organizations whose missions they like. Senator Whitehouse is free to disagree with any particular legal argument or judicial decision, but he misunderstands that basic dynamic.
The hearing was kabuki theater at best. After representatives from left-wing organizations railed against Supreme Court decisions, the Federalist Society and Republicans generally, two witnesses addressed those drive-by calumnies. Case Western law professor Jonathan Adler, who edited a book called Business and the Roberts Court, refuted the myths that the Court has some sort of improper business-oriented bias. Scott Walter of the Capital Research Center detailed how the money flowing from progressive organizations dwarfs their conservative counterparts. I submitted written testimony, which focused on three things: (1) allegations that the Republican-appointed justices vote in lockstep; (2) problems with the Judicial Ads Act that was introduced in the last Congress to counteract “Court capture”; and (3) insinuations that filers of amicus briefs represent the cat’s paw of various industry interests.
New York Times: For Voting Rights Advocates, a ‘Once in a Generation Moment’ Looms
By Nicholas Fandos and Michael Wines
After approval of the Democratic bill in the House, the campaign to pass the For the People Act, designated Senate Bill 1, increasingly appears to be on a collision course with the filibuster. The rule requires 60 votes for passage of most legislation in a bitterly divided Senate, meaning that Republicans can kill the voting bill and scores of other liberal priorities despite unified Democratic control of Washington.
To succeed, Democrats will have to convince a handful of moderate holdouts to change the rules, at least for this legislation, with the likelihood that a single defection in their own party would doom their efforts. It is a daunting path with no margin for error, but activists believe the costs for failure, given the Republican limits on voting, would be so high that some accommodation on the filibuster could become inevitable.
Two left-leaning elections groups, the advocacy arm of End Citizens United and Let America Vote along with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, plan this week to announce an infusion of $30 million to try to hasten the groundswell. The money will fund paid advertising in at least a dozen states and finance organizers to target Democratic and Republican swing senators in six of them…
“This bill is the opposite of good governance — it’s a cynical attempt by the left to put their thumb on the scales of democracy and engineer our laws to help them win elections,” said Dan Conston, president of the Republican-aligned American Action Network. “They want to limit free speech, funnel public funds into their campaign accounts, seize from states the ability to run their own free and fair elections, and then spin it like this is really all about protecting voting rights.” …
In an interview, [Sen. Amy] Klobuchar suggested that if senators could not agree to scrap the filibuster altogether, they could try to find a compromise, potentially allowing measures on voting and elections like Senate Bill 1 to pass with a simple majority, but not other bills.
“It is so fundamental to everything else, it has to get done,” she said.
PACs
Roll Call: Corporate PAC donations to parties and candidates plummet after Capitol riot
By Kate Ackley and Herb Jackson
Donations to candidates and party committees from the PACs that vowed to suspend some or all donations [following the Capitol riot] — more than 100 connected to companies and trade associations, as compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics — totaled just $50,150 in January, compared with more than $2.7 million in January 2019, at the same point in the election cycle, a CQ Roll Call analysis of disclosures with the Federal Election Commission found.
That’s a drop of more than 98 percent…
All PAC contributions — not just from those that announced a pause — dropped off the table in January for the four committees that power congressional campaigns: the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
Compared to the same point in 2019, the NRSC’s receipts from all corporate PACs fell 91 percent in January, from $889,000 to $80,000, according to data on Political MoneyLine. And that was the smallest percentage drop of the big four, with the DCCC going down by 93 percent, and the DSCC and NRCC each dropping by 97 percent…
The pandemic has also led to companies curbing their PAC investments, [Kristin Brackemyre, director of PAC and government relations for the Public Affairs Council] said.
“COVID is a big factor,” she said. “I definitely think with the pandemic, a lot of people are reevaluating, and asking, ‘If we’re not able to do events in person or do trips, is there a benefit to giving?’ Many people are just not in a hurry to make contributions.”
Online Speech Platforms
Buzzfeed News: Facebook Created An Employee “Playbook” To Respond To Accusations Of Polarization
By Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman
Facebook has created a ”playbook” to help its employees rebut criticism that the company’s products fuel political polarization and social division.
The document, which cites a range of academic studies but does not include recent data from the company’s own research teams, was posted to Facebook’s internal Workplace discussion forum by Chief Product Officer Chris Cox and Pratiti Raychoudhury, vice president of research, earlier this week. During a Thursday webinar for employees, Cox said the document would “equip all of you to go home and have dinner” with friends and family and explain why public perceptions of Facebook are wrong.
In the paper, titled “What We Know About Polarization,” Cox and Raychoudhury call polarization “an albatross public narrative for the company.”
“The implicit argument is that Facebook is contributing to a social problem of driving societies into contexts where they can’t trust each other, can’t share common ground, can’t have conversation about issues, and can’t share a common view on reality,” they write, adding that “the media narrative in this case is generally not supported by the research.”
While denying that Facebook meaningfully contributes to polarization, Pablo Barberá, a research scientist at the company, also suggested political polarization could be a good thing during Thursday’s presentation.
“If we look back at history, a lot of the major social movements and major transformations, for example, the extension of civil rights or voting rights in this country have been the result of increasing polarization,” he told employees.
Vox (Recode): Facebook is doing its best to counter anti-vaccination damage done by Facebook
By Rani Molla
On Monday, Facebook revealed a plan aimed at getting 50 million people vaccinated, the latest in a string of efforts by the social media company to combat the Covid-19 pandemic and the misinformation that has thrived on its platform. The campaign follows years of criticism directed at Facebook for not doing enough to fight the dangers of the anti-vaccination movement…
On top of all this, and perhaps more critically, Facebook is doing something it hates: limiting the spread of information. The company also announced it would temporarily reduce the distribution of content from users who have violated its Covid-19 and vaccine misinformation policies, or who continue to share content that its fact-checking partners have debunked. Figuring out what is and isn’t misinformation is tricky business, and it’s tough to tell the difference between people purposefully misleading others and having legitimate questions.
The States
Helena Independent Record: Campaign finance amendment resolution shot down by committee
By Sam Wilson
A proposed resolution urging Congress to propose a constitutional amendment to prohibit corporate campaign contributions was shot down by Republicans in a House panel Monday, while several other GOP proposals stayed alive.
The House State Administration Committee tabled House Resolution 3 after it failed to pass on a party-line vote, with Democrats supporting the measure. There was no discussion prior to the vote.
During the committee’s hearing on the resolution last week, its sponsor, Rep. Andrea Olsen, D-Missoula, called it “an attempt to limit how corporate money influences our political decisions, because it affects who we elect, how we elect people and the policies we create.”
Washington Examiner: Bills introduced in Texas Legislature would prohibit social media companies from censoring political viewpoints
By Bethany Blankley
Texas lawmakers rolled out legislation that would prohibit and penalize social media companies from censoring Texans on their platforms.
In a press conference held in Tyler, Texas with state Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, Gov. Greg Abbott expressed his support of Senate Bill 12, which would bar social media companies from censoring people based on their viewpoints. Rep. Jeff Cason, R-Euless, introduced the companion bill this week, House Bill 3001, the Protect Free Speech on Social Media Act.
The bills would also allow individuals to sue if they are wrongfully de-platformed or restricted.
“Social media sites have become our modern-day public squares where information should be able to flow freely, but social media companies are now acting as judge and jury on determining what viewpoints are valid,” Abbott said. “America was built on freedom of speech and healthy public debate, and efforts to silence conservative viewpoints on social media are wrong and weaken public discourse.
Abbott expressed his commitment to “help protect Texans from being wrongfully censored on social media for voicing their political or religious viewpoints,” and “taking a stand against Big Tech’s political censorship and protecting Texans’ right to freedom of expression.”
Abbott expects the bill to pass and to be signed into law.
