In the News
New Jersey Monitor: Roselle Park bows out of fight over profane anti-Biden flags
By Dana DiFilippo
Roselle Park has dropped its case against a borough resident who displayed profane anti-Biden flags outside her home, a decision applauded by free speech experts who said town officials were violating the resident’s free speech protections.
The borough’s attorney told a state Superior Court judge in Union County Tuesday that Roselle Park would dismiss the charges it filed against Andrea Dick over the “Fuck Biden” flags at the center of the controversy, according to a report on NJ.com. The borough said the flags violate a local anti-obscenity ordinance…
David Keating, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Free Speech, said the four-letter word on Dick’s flag “is not considered an obscenity.”
“It’s not obscene,” Keating said. “It’s just not.”
That was established in the 1971 case Cohen V. California, which involved a man who wore a jacket with a profane, anti-draft message into a Los Angeles courthouse, Keating said. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the man’s right to do so, saying curse words are subjective and “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.”
New from the Institute for Free Speech
ProPublica Leak Illustrates Importance of IRS Privacy Reform
By Tiffany Donnelly
Just last month, the news outlet ProPublica unwittingly demonstrated the serious risk of leaks at the IRS when it published a story based on a “vast cache” of confidential information about individual American taxpayers.
It may be tempting to shrug off leaked or hacked IRS information when it happens to people with more wealth than most Americans can imagine. But breaches of privacy can just as easily hurt anyone – regardless of their means – as well as their loved ones and the social causes they care about. This is especially true when the IRS collects and warehouses the membership information of civically engaged nonprofits and advocacy groups.
As Americans, we all have the right to privately support causes we believe in. The fear of harassment and intimidation for expressing your view about a political or social issue is very real. Threats of being “doxed” in a culture that seems to increasingly value “name and shame” tactics is bad enough. The last thing we need is for the IRS to build entire databases of private information it doesn’t need, to one day be illicitly accessed and weaponized for political gain.
What’s worse, ProPublica admits the information may have come from a hostile state actor. Donor reporting and disclosure are often promoted as a means of preventing foreign interference in U.S. politics, but if hostile state actors can access the donor lists of social causes, it puts Americans at further risk and opens the door to the exact illicit foreign influence that many are trying to prevent. And at what cost? Merely Americans’ cherished freedoms of association and privacy.
Congress
New York Times: Biden is to meet with top Democrats on voting rights as senators ready a scaled-back proposal.
By Nicholas Fandos and Nick Corasaniti
President Biden and the top Democrats in Congress are expected to meet at the White House on Friday to discuss their party’s faltering efforts to pass major voting rights legislation, according to two congressional aides familiar with the plans.
Mr. Biden’s meeting with Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York comes at a crucial moment, as activists are pushing the president to use his power and Democrats’ control of Congress to protect voting rights…
A spokesman for the White House declined to comment on the meeting. The two congressional aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans, cautioned that the timing of the meeting was still being finalized.
Democrats are close to finalizing a scaled-back bill that activists hope could be a battering ram in the fight over the filibuster…
Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, confirmed on Thursday that a small group of Democratic senators had been meeting to hash out a revised bill that could be released in the coming days. Among them is Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a moderate who balked at some of the more expansive proposals in the For the People Act and has been a determined holdout on keeping the filibuster intact…
The revised elections legislation is built around a rough framework provided by Mr. Manchin earlier this year. It is expected to mandate…campaign finance provisions that would require super PACs to disclose the identities of their big donors.
National Review: Americans, Not Government, Are the Arbiters of Truth
By Bill Hagerty
The cozy relationship between Big Government and Big Tech has blossomed into brazen collusion. When the White House doesn’t like what Americans are saying, they pick up the phone and use government power to pressure unaccountable Big Tech corporations to censor Americans.
This scheme to end-run the Constitution by secretly working with tech platforms to censor Americans’ speech is not only disturbing but also wholly inconsistent with the government’s constitutional role in American life. It is completely contrary to the foundational principles embedded in the First Amendment to our Constitution. That’s why I’m taking action, working with Senate colleagues, to ensure such efforts aren’t hidden from the American people…
That’s why I, working with Senators Marco Rubio, Ron Johnson, Mike Rounds, and Roger Marshall, am introducing the Disclose Government Censorship Act. This legislation would require government officials in the executive and legislative branches to publicly disclose any communications with Big Tech regarding action to restrict speech — action that would plainly violate the First Amendment if the government itself did it. It includes appropriate exceptions for law enforcement or national-security matters.
Washington Examiner: Top House Republicans drop new bill to rein in Big Tech censorship
By Nihal Krishan
Top House Republicans dropped new legislation Wednesday to overhaul a controversial law that gives social media platforms legal immunity for content, attempting to reduce what they say is rampant censorship of conservatives.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Republican Leader Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington and House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jim Jordan of Ohio introduced a draft discussion bill to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a provision that protects social media companies such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter from being sued for content posted by their users.
The draft legislation, supported by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, aims to stop social media giants with hundreds of millions of users from having Section 230 protections, hold the major platforms accountable for content moderation decisions, empower users to challenge unfair instances of censorship online, and force the tech companies to be transparent about what they censor and why.
“Big Tech is out to get conservatives. This draft legislation builds upon previous work by our conference to undo the legal immunity that Big Tech hides behind to evade accountability,” Jordan said in a statement Wednesday.
National Review: The True Meaning of ‘Misinformation’
By Mario Loyola
Last week Senators Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) and Ben Ray Luján (D., N.M.) introduced a bill designed to suppress dangerous misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. Like similar proposals on the right, the bill would limit the liability shield of Section 230 for social-media platforms. Unlike proposals on the right, however, the Democratic senators have a correct understanding of what limiting the liability shield would accomplish — namely to further incentivize Big Tech to suppress conservative speech…
Think about it. If the Klobuchar bill were concerned with actual misinformation rather than arbitrary control, wouldn’t it contain a simple, objective definition of “misinformation”? Well, it doesn’t. Instead, it empowers the Ministry of Truth — er, I mean the Department of Health and Human Services — to define medical misinformation…
The progressive campaign against “misinformation” is not just a lurch toward the persecution of political opponents under the all-too-familiar cover of public safety. And it is not merely a danger to public health. It is an attack on the very idea of democratic government, which, like a court of law, relies primordially on an adversarial dialectic to get near the truth.
Candidates and Campaigns
Bloomberg Government: PAC Money Plunge Offset by Explosion in Online Campaign Giving
By Kenneth P. Doyle
The steep dropoff in political action committee contributions to members of Congress this year likely won’t bring the same concerns for incumbents that it once might have.
Precipitated by the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, congressional campaigns’ total PAC receipts of $76.8 million through two quarters were about 31% lower than in the comparable period in the 2020 election cycle, according to FEC figures analyzed by Bloomberg Government. But PAC money as a percentage of overall fundraising was already on the decline.
Since the 2018 election cycle, congressional campaigns have capitalized on the boom in small-dollar donations and relied on PAC money far less than in the past. In the first half of the last decade, PAC money consistently accounted for a quarter of total funding of House and Senate campaigns. By 2020, PAC money’s share fell to 12%.
Online contributions by small-dollar donors “have exploded,” said Rick Pildes, a New York University law professor who studies campaign financing…
PAC contributions bounced back modestly in the second quarter from the 40% drop in the three months immediately after Jan. 6.
The overall slowdown is due to corporate PACs, who were pressed to stop giving by watchdog groups and others.
The States
Washington Post: Industries that gave to a governor’s campaign were more likely to be declared ‘essential’
By Jesse Crosson and Srinivas Parinandi
Why did some states declare dozens of industries “essential” and therefore able to remain open while others designated only a few? In a recently published paper, we looked at whether an industry’s donations to a governor’s campaign might help explain this variation.
Generally speaking, political scientists have struggled to measure any links between campaign donations and policy results. At best, campaign donations seem to sometimes give donors access to politicians’ offices — a necessary but by no means sufficient condition for influence over policy outcomes…
Even if you could buy policy results, who would you pay? For legislation to pass, a majority of representatives and senators, as well as the executive, must agree. “Buying” policy results is more complicated than it might seem.
But declaring a business essential is different from passing legislation; governors made those decisions unilaterally…We decided to see if we could find a link between campaign donations and essential business declarations.
Virginia Mercury: Anemic start for Virginia’s campaign finance study could delay final report
By Graham Moomaw
As both political parties flood supporters with desperate-sounding pleas for money to win the 2021 elections, an effort to study campaign finance reform in Virginia is off to a decidedly less urgent start.
A joint General Assembly subcommittee approved in February to study whether Virginia needs stricter laws on money in politics still hasn’t held its first meeting.
With most of the summer gone and less than 100 days left to finish its work by a Nov. 1 deadline, some policymakers are now wondering if they have enough time to complete the study on time.
“I think the whole thing could be pushed back,” Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Bath, a subcommittee co-chair, said in an interview this week.
Del. Marcus Simon, D-Fairfax, the other co-chair, agreed. He said the group may need to rethink how comprehensive the study can realistically be whenever it meets for the first time, probably at some point in August.
“We’ll try and set the table then figure out what things we can do,” said Simon, who has advocated for banning the personal use of campaign funds, which is prohibited in federal elections and most other states but allowed under Virginia law.
