In the News
Legal News Line: Free speech group supports conservative activist Eyman in battle with Washington attorney general
By Karen Kidd
A First Amendment advocacy group’s amicus brief and more details from Washington’s attorney general are among recent filings ahead of Friday’s hearing over a possible punishment for longtime conservative activist Tim Eyman.
In its amicus brief, the Institute for Free Speech, based in Alexandria, Virginia, called the requested ban by Attorney General Bob Ferguson “nothing short of a prior restraint on protected First Amendment activity.” Ferguson’s office says it wants to prevent Eyman from handling the finances for political groups – something Eyman feels essentially bans him from any activism…
“The state’s brief spends significant time cataloging Mr. Eyman’s alleged misdeeds,” the amicus brief said. “But when it comes to marshalling a legal justification for this radical demand, it protests that Mr. Eyman has not ‘show[n] that the conduct in question is constitutionally protected’.”
The amicus brief countered that “the conduct in question is unquestionably constitutionally protected” and doubted Ferguson’s case can pass constitutional muster.
“In fact, the state insists on nothing short of a prior restraint on protected First Amendment activity, a demand subject to strict scrutiny,” the amicus brief said. “And the state cannot possibly meet that standard because a less restrictive path – the millions of dollars in threatened fines that have already ruined Mr. Eyman financially and deprived him of counsel in this case – is available to the state and adequate to its purposes.”
New from the Institute for Free Speech
By Alex Baiocco
Last week, Senate Democrats introduced their companion bill to the House’s recently passed H.R. 1, also known misleadingly as the “For the People Act.” The press conference held by the bill’s lead sponsors was quite the spectacle. From Senator Sheldon Whitehouse describing Americans who choose to associate privately as “cockroaches” to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer referring to advocacy groups as “evil forces,” it was a grand display of hyperbolic fearmongering and ahistorical nonsense…
After railing against those who dare speak about powerful politicians as “people of malign influence,” Senator Schumer said this:
“This idea that the First Amendment means that a multibillionaire can put as much money into our political system as anyone else had nothing to do with the First Amendment until these right-wing think tanks thought that up, and unfortunately, a Supreme Court that’s become much more political went along.”…
In 1974, Congress passed amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) imposing, among other things, limits on the amounts that candidates and groups could spend on campaign speech. Plaintiffs, including the New York Civil Liberties Union and former Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, challenged these limits under the First Amendment.
In 1976, the Supreme Court struck down all of FECA’s spending limits…
In 2010, with amicus support from such “right-wing think tanks” as the American Civil Liberties Union and The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the conservative nonprofit Citizens United successfully challenged portions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA)…
Prior to the Citizens United case, EMILY’s List, a group that advocates for the election of Democratic women who support abortion rights, successfully challenged limits on spending by nonprofit groups in the D.C. Circuit.
Event
Cato: Why the Government Should Not Regulate Content Moderation by Social Media
By Ellen Robinson
Featuring John Samples, Vice President, Cato Institute; Matthew Feeney, Director, Project on Emerging Technologies, Cato Institute; moderated by Jeff Vanderslice, Director, Government and External Affairs, Cato Institute.
Until recently, private social media companies have been free to moderate content on their own platforms. But accusations of political bias have caused some to call for government regulation of the efforts social media companies make to moderate content. Some have even suggested that social media entities ought to be nationalized to ensure they operate in the public interest. Is there a role here for government to play, or would government intervention create unintended consequences while simultaneously stifling free speech? These are just some of the questions addressed in John Samples’s recently published policy analysis, “Why the Government Should Not Regulate Content Moderation by Social Media.”
Join us on Monday, April 15, to hear from author John Samples and the director of Cato’s project on emerging technologies, Matthew Feeney.
Date: April 15
Time: 12:00PM to 1:00PM EDT
Location: 2045 Rayburn House Office Building
Congress
Washington Post: House lawmakers to question Facebook, Google on spread of white nationalism online
By Tony Romm
The scheduled April 9 hearing by the House Judiciary Committee seeks to probe “the impact white nationalist groups have on American communities and the spread of white identity ideology,” the panel announced Wednesday, along with “what social media companies can do” to stop the spread of extremist content on the web.
Facebook, Google and other tech giants long have faced criticism from Congress for failing to crack down on a wide array of abusive posts, photos and videos that attack people on the basis of race, gender or other traits. These companies and their peers, including Twitter, explicitly bar such attacks. But their heightened attention to the issue and investments in more content reviewers -along with more potent artificial intelligence tools – still haven’t thwarted the proliferation of troubling content…
Last week, Facebook said it would ban photos, posts and other content that reference white nationalism and white separatism. Previously, Facebook only barred white supremacy from its site. The new policy, which also applies to Instagram, came in response to months of criticism from civil-rights groups, which fretted that Facebook had created a loophole for extremism through its inconsistent rules…
One of the organizations that pressured Facebook to change its policy, the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, is set to testify at the House hearing next week, along with representatives from groups including the Anti-Defamation League. Testifying on behalf of Facebook is Neil Potts, a public policy director, and testifying from Google is Alexandria Walden, a counsel for free expression and human rights. Committee leaders said Wednesday that additional witnesses could be scheduled.
Kansas City Star: To defend democracy around the world, we must first fix it at home
By Jeffrey Prescott and Tiffany Muller
Last week, Senate Democrats introduced their version of the For the People Act, the democracy reform and anti-corruption bill adopted by the House earlier this month…
At no time in our modern history have our democratic shortcomings and loopholes at home taken such a toll on our national security, and the reform efforts moving through Congress are among the most needed tools to protect ourselves from external threats.
We need only consider what happened two years ago as a reminder of the vulnerability of our democracy. Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election was an unprecedented assault against our democratic institutions. Russian intelligence-run bots flooded online discourse with disinformation and seeded social media with divisive advertising, while their hackers targeted voter registration databases across several states. And American intelligence officials have repeatedly testified to the fact that Russia’s onslaught remains ongoing and could intensify in the run-up to 2020.
But disinformation campaigns and espionage are not the only ways foreign actors have tried to influence our politics. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, foreign corporations have been able to funnel donations to their preferred candidates through U.S. trade associations, shell companies and super PACs…
The For the People Act would help secure our democracy against hostile adversaries and restore public faith in our government.
Online Speech Platforms
ABC News: Interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: TRANSCRIPT
You know, after 2016, when we saw what Russia tried to do, in interfering in the election — we’ve implemented a lot of different measures to verify any advertiser who’s running a political ad to create an archive of all the political ads, so anyone can see what advertisers are running, who they’re targeting, how much they’re paying — any other ads that they say. But one of the things that’s unclear is, actually, what is the definition of a political ad, right? And that’s a really fundamental question for this…
All of the laws around political advertising today primarily focus on a candidate and an election, right, so, “Vote for this candidate in this election.” But that’s not, primarily, what we saw Russia trying to do and other folks who were trying to interfere in elections. And what we saw them doing was talking about divisive political issues. They’d run, simultaneously, different campaigns on social media trying to argue for immigration or against immigration. And the goal wasn’t, actually, to advance the issue forward. It was just to rile people up and be divisive. But the current laws around what is political advertising don’t consider discussion issues to be political. So that’s just one of the examples of where you know, it’s not clear to me, after working on this for a few years now, that we want a private company to be making that kind of a fundamental decision about, you know, what is political speech? And how should that be regulated? …
We need new rules, right? It’s not, you can’t say that an election is just some period before people go to vote. I mean, the kind of information operations that these folks are trying to do now are ongoing, permanently. So I just think that we need new rules on this.
Candidates and Campaigns
CNN: Very few Americans are satisfied with campaign finance laws, but most don’t know a lot about them
By Grace Sparks
As major presidential hopefuls release their fundraising numbers from the first quarter this week, recent polling finds just 1 in 5 Americans say they are satisfied with the nation’s campaign finance laws.
The January Gallup poll found that exactly 20% of Americans were OK with how the US handles campaign finance. That’s tied with its poll in 2016 for the lowest who have said so since it started tracking in 2001. Democrats tended to be less satisfied than Republicans — 26% of Republicans said campaign finances laws are OK and 15% of Democrats agreed…
In a late 2015 survey conducted by AP-NORC, 53% of Americans said they know only a little or nothing at all about the rules governing the financing of campaigns and only 13% said they know a great deal or quite a bit…
Americans found that using PACs was one of the less acceptable legal methods of financing campaigns cited in the poll.
The least acceptable method was public financing from the federal government, a totally legal use of taxpayer dollars. Slightly more than a quarter thought that was an acceptable way of financing a campaign.
The States
Iowa Standard: Donor privacy bill dies in Iowa House
By Jacob Hall
House File 697, a bill sponsored by Rep. Steve Holt (R-Denison), creates additional protections for donors to nonprofit 501(c) organizations. It was scheduled to be debated on Monday in the Iowa House, but it did not run.
Later that evening, Rep. Chuck Isenhart (D-Dubuque) made the post below on his Facebook account:
“Today, the mighty Rep. Karin Derry took down a Republican bill in the Iowa House that would have protected, by law, the ability of “dark money” PACs to keep their big-money donors secret. As you know, these so-called “social welfare” organizations are ruining our politics and elections, drowning out the voices of average people. Kudos, Karin!”
In looking at the bill and the amendment filed by Rep. Karin Derry (D-Johnston), this post appears to have several inaccuracies.
For starters, this bill deals specifically with donors to 501(c) organizations. Political action committes (PACs) are required to make their donors public per campaign finance law. PACs are completely different from 501(c) organizations.
This bill specifically protects the voices of average people, contrary to Rep. Isenhart’s post. Individuals with substantial wealth often find creative ways to move money to make tracing it back difficult…
Rep. Derry’s amendment would have limited the scope of the bill to strictly 501(c)3 organizations. This amendment was likely designed to target conservative organizations under the guise of keeping “dark money” out of politics, but in reality, it strips protections for groups across the political spectrum…
Supporters for the bill include conservative organizations like the FAMiLY Leader, Americans for Prosperity and Iowans for Tax Relief. On the other side of the aisle, Planned Parenthood, the Coalition Against Domestic Violence, OneIowa and the ACLU also support House File 697 as written.
Albuquerque Journal: Lujan Grisham OKs bills on guns, medical cannabis, campaign finance
By Dan McKay
Thursday’s action also included approval of legislation to strengthen disclosure requirements for political spending by “dark-money” groups and revise limits on campaign donations.
Lujan Grisham said Thursday that the increased disclosure in Senate Bill 3 will give “the public and voters the information they need to determine who is trying to influence their vote.”
In 2017, Martinez rejected legislation to require disclosure of dark-money campaign spending by nonprofit groups, arguing it was poorly written.
This year’s bill also creates legislative caucus committees that can accept campaign contributions of up to $25,000 from a single donor before the primary and another $25,000 before the general election. Gubernatorial candidates, by contrast, will face caps of $10,000 before each election, and most other candidates will have a $5,000 limit.
USA Today: You elected them to write new laws. They’re letting corporations do it instead.
By Rob O’Dell and Nick Penzenstadler
Each year, state lawmakers across the U.S. introduce thousands of bills dreamed up and written by corporations, industry groups and think tanks.
Disguised as the work of lawmakers, these so-called “model” bills get copied in one state Capitol after another, quietly advancing the agenda of the people who write them.
A two-year investigation by USA TODAY, The Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity reveals for the first time the extent to which special interests have infiltrated state legislatures using model legislation.
USA TODAY and the Republic found at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law.
The investigation examined nearly 1 million bills in all 50 states and Congress using a computer algorithm developed to detect similarities in language. That search – powered by the equivalent of 150 computers that ran nonstop for months – compared known model legislation with bills introduced by lawmakers.
The phenomenon of copycat legislation is far larger. In a separate analysis, the Center for Public Integrity identified tens of thousands of bills with identical phrases, then traced the origins of that language in dozens of those bills across the country…
Copycat bills don’t appear on expense reports, or campaign finance forms. They don’t require someone to register as a lobbyist or sign in at committee hearings. But once injected into the lawmaking process, they can go viral, spreading state to state, executing an agenda to the letter.
