The Courts
Reuters: NRA sues Los Angeles over law requiring disclosure of ties to gun rights group
By Jonathan Stempel
The National Rifle Association sued Los Angeles on Wednesday over a new law requiring that contractors disclose their ties to the gun rights group as a condition of obtaining business from the second most-populous U.S. city.
Los Angeles was accused of trying to “silence NRA’s voice, as well as the voices of all those who dare oppose the city’s broad gun-control agenda,” …
The NRA said the law is unconstitutional because it violates its First Amendment right to free speech and association, and its 14th Amendment right to equal protection, according to its complaint in federal court in Los Angeles…
The lawsuit was filed 11 months after the NRA sued New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, accusing him of threatening its survival by pushing insurers and state-chartered banks to stop doing business with gun rights groups…
“This is one of the largest cities in the country using its power to bully lawful businesses and individual members based on their political viewpoint,” the complaint said.
Chuck Michel, a lawyer for the NRA, in a statement accused Los Angeles of “modern day McCarthyism,” echoing language he used in February when the law was passed.
The case is National Rifle Association et al v. City of Los Angeles et al, U.S. District Court, Central District of California, No. 19-03212.
Constitutional Law Prof Blog: Fifth Circuit Rule for Plaintiff in Free Speech Challenge to Sheriff Office Facebook Page
By Steven D. Schwinn
The Fifth Circuit ruled earlier this week that a sheriff office’s official Facebook page was a public forum; that the office’s posting rules were based on the viewpoint of the poster, in violation of the First Amendment; and that the rules constituted official county policy. The ruling reverses a lower court’s denial of a preliminary injunction and remands the case for further proceedings. (That is, the case is still at a preliminary stage, though the ruling answers many of the legal questions.)
The case, Robinson v. Hunt County, Texas, tested the Hunt County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page. According to the page, “We welcome your input and POSITIVE comments regarding the Hunt County Sheriff’s Office.” Moreover, “We encourage you to submit comments, but please note that this is NOT a public forum.” …
Robinson and others posted on the page criticizing the policy as a violation of the First Amendment. Robinson’s post was removed, and she was banned from the page. She sued individual officers and the county and moved for a preliminary injunction. The district court denied the injunction and later dismissed the case for failure to state a claim.
The Fifth Circuit reversed as to the county. (Robinson didn’t appeal as to the individual officers.) The court held that she sufficiently pleaded a constitutional violation, because the defendants’ actions constituted viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment. The court said that the Facebook page was a public forum, and it didn’t matter which kind (designated or limited), because either way viewpoint-based discrimination was impermissible. The court held that the policy constituted official policy (for purposes of Robinson’s Section 1983 claim against the county), because Robinson “has plausibly alleged that Hunt County had an explicit policy of viewpoint discrimination on the HCSO Facebook page,” through the sheriff’s official control of the page.
DOJ
Election Law Blog: Michael Cohen Claims He Pled Guilty on Tax and Fraud Changes Because Prosecutors “Had [Him] on Campaign Finance”; Did His Lawyers Give Him Bad Advice?
By Rick Hasen
In a recent Slate piece, I noted some of the issues with going after President Trump on campaign finance charges related to hush money payments, charges to which Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty. I added: “Cohen might have pleaded guilty to these crimes rather than fight them raising these potential defenses because he was already pleading to other charges and saw no point in contesting these, which allowed him to attack the president as a co-conspirator in a criminal enterprise.”
And yet now in a secretly recorded phone conversation with actor Tom Arnold, Cohen said the opposite. According to the WSJ, which got to hear the recording, “Speaking privately with Mr. Arnold, Mr. Cohen said he had pleaded guilty to the charges in August because ‘they had me on campaign finance’ and prosecutors were targeting his wife. Mr. Cohen had failed to disclose to the Internal Revenue Service more than $2.4 million in interest payments he had received from loans, some of which were deposited in an account under his wife’s name, New York federal prosecutors wrote in a court filing. Mr. Cohen’s wife declined to comment.”
Given the legal questions about the campaign finance charges, I wonder about the legal advice Cohen has received.
The Media
Daily Beast: Democratic Ad Firm Accused of Fake News Retools for 2020
By Lachlan Markay
The apparently political nature of MotiveAI’s ad campaign last year led the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, a right-leaning watchdog group, to lodge a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. The group alleged that News for Democracy, one of the LLCs that MotiveAI had used to pay for political ads on Facebook, had failed to disclose what amounted to outright political advocacy, as required by law…
But FACT’s complaint failed to grapple with a key question, according to Brendan Fischer, the director of federal and FEC reform programs at the Campaign Legal Center.
The complaint “doesn’t show that these ads would not qualify for the media exemption,” Fischer explained. “The FEC correctly gives broad latitude to media, so to argue that an organization calling itself ‘News for Democracy’ should be subject to campaign finance regulation would require showing that the entity is not a legitimate press entity, or that it is not acting in its legitimate press function when running these ads. The complaint doesn’t do that.”
In 2020, Versa is not taking chances that groups like FACT may tighten their FEC complaints. It’s recasting its approach to make it closer to that of a news organization, which should, in turn, make arguments that it is engaged in surreptitious politicking more difficult to mount.
That divide between news and political content is one with which Facebook itself has been forced to grapple as it attempts to make its role as a political advertising platform more transparent…
MotiveAI has already faced some scrutiny from Facebook over how it delivers its advertising. In January, the Washington Post reported that the company was investigating News for Democracy and other MotiveAI-affiliated pages over allegations that their ad campaigns misrepresented the interests behind them.
Politico: How the Intercept Is Fueling the Democratic Civil War
By Steven Perlberg
Reporter Akela Lacy revealed that [Mark] Kelly, who like many progressive hopefuls claimed he was running a campaign free of corporate PAC donations, had made at least 19 paid corporate speeches in front of audiences including Goldman Sachs. A follow-up story dinged Kelly for another swampy tradition: a planned appearance at a fundraiser hosted by lobbyists from Capitol Counsel, a major Washington firm…
For the Intercept, it was another notch on an increasingly crowded belt-mostly decorated with attacks on Democrats…
[T]he Intercept is still best-known for its first incarnation as an obsessive anti-surveillance reporting enterprise, and an activist voice for privacy and civil liberties-more anti-government than partisan…
But in the past few years, and especially in the aftermath of the 2016 campaign, the Intercept has taken a sharp turn into party politics…
Waleed Shahid, communications director for Justice Democrats, the progressive political action committee that backed AOC, says the Intercept was crucial to Ocasio-Cortez’s election…
“I think they have a singular and very influential purpose. They drive attention and money to challengers in different races,” says one aide to an establishment Democrat who has been on the receiving end of the Intercept treatment…
Much of the inherent distrust of the Intercept among the mainstream Democratic apparatus stems from the long shadow of the publication’s co-founder, the singular Glenn Greenwald…
[I]nternally, some employees say Greenwald’s presence undermines the site’s work. “People assume Glenn’s tweets reflect some sort of internal consensus, but the truth is I don’t think there’s a single other person here who agreed with him on Trump/Russia,” says one Intercept staffer. “I’d hope people don’t view us as less legitimate just because of one guy.”
Online Speech Platforms
Washington Post: Sri Lanka’s social media shutdown illustrates global discontent with Silicon Valley
By Tony Romm, Elizabeth Dwoskin, and Craig Timberg
“What happened yesterday with the government shutting down access to social media is part of a much larger picture that’s happening all over the world,” said Michael Abramowitz, the president of Freedom House, a Washington-based think tank that measures political rights and civil liberties globally. “There’s much, much more major effort by government to regulate the Internet, to restrict access to social media.”
Authoritarian-leaning countries have long worked to rein in social media when it challenged their ability to control information. But over the past year, more democratic governments have started to target social media sites, considering new regulations to stamp out disinformation during elections and to prevent their use as rallying points for hatred and extremism…
In the United States, social media giants benefit from the First Amendment’s guarantee that the government will keep its hands off speech. “The real solution is for social media companies to do a better job in removing hate speech and not allowing their platforms to incite violence,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who represents a portion of Silicon Valley.
But the desire to regulate social media has gained global appeal, even in countries with strong protections for free expression, because of Silicon Valley’s recent missteps. Interference by Russian agents on Facebook and Twitter helped divide the public during the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Europe’s Brexit campaign. Automated accounts, or bots, falsely amplified online campaigns in an attempt to sow discord around sensitive political topics.
New York Times: Sri Lanka Shut Down Social Media. My First Thought Was ‘Good.’
By Kara Swisher
It pains me as a journalist, and someone who once believed that a worldwide communications medium would herald more tolerance, to admit this – to say that my first instinct was to turn it all off. But it has become clear to me with every incident that the greatest experiment in human interaction in the history of the world continues to fail in ever more dangerous ways.
In short: Stop the Facebook/YouTube/Twitter world – we want to get off.
Obviously, that is an impossible request and one that does not address the root cause of the problem, which is that humanity can be deeply inhumane. But that tendency has been made worse by tech in ways that were not anticipated by those who built it.
I noted this in my very first column for The Times almost a year ago, when I called social media giants “digital arms dealers of the modern age” who had, by sloppy design, weaponized pretty much everything that could be weaponized.
“They have weaponized civic discourse,” I wrote. “And they have weaponized, most of all, politics. Which is why malevolent actors continue to game the platforms and why there’s still no real solution in sight anytime soon, because they were built to work exactly this way.” …
These platforms give voice to everyone, but some of those voices are false or, worse, malevolent, and the companies continue to struggle with how to deal with them.
In the early days of the internet, there was a lot of talk of how this was a good thing, getting rid of those gatekeepers. Well, they are gone now, and that means we need to have a global discussion involving all parties on how to handle the resulting disaster, well beyond adding more moderators or better algorithms.
Reason: Sri Lankan Government Blocks Social Media Access Over Alleged Fake News
By Joe Setyon
“If I were #facebook and #whatsapp I’d take a moment to ask myself where I’d gone wrong,” Ivan Sigal, executive director of the journalism and digital advocacy group Global Voices, writes on Twitter. “A few years ago we’d view the blocking of social media sites after an attack as outrageous censorship; now we think of it as essential duty of care, to protect ourselves from threat,” he adds…
While there may have been some misinformation spreading in the initial aftermath, the Sri Lankan government’s action highlights the danger of banning social media apps right after a tragedy. “What we’ve seen is that when social media is shut down, it creates a vacuum of information that’s readily exploited by other parties,” NetBlocks Executive Director Alp Toker tells the Associated Press, arguing that “it can add to the sense of fear and can cause panic.”
“That’s going to be a problem for people trying to communicate with friends and family,” he adds.
Joan Donavan, who leads the Harvard Kennedy School’s technology and social change research project at the Shorenstein Center, echoes those sentiments. “We know based on the past that in crises, everyone goes online to find information,” she tells The Guardian. “When there are large-scale fatalities and multiple emergencies, it’s very important for people to be able to communicate and feel safe….This really puts people who already have vulnerable access to communication in a much worse position. It is a dangerous precedent to set.”
That’s not all. Banning social media to stop the spread of fake news means the misinformation might not get debunked. “While a ban on social media helps to contain the spread of rumors, it also hampers efforts by journalists to push back on them,” Hattotuwa tells the Post.
Fundraising
New York Times: The Big Money Challenge Awaiting Joe Biden in the 2020 Race
By Shane Goldmacher
Mr. Biden’s allies have pointed with concern to the $6 million sums that Mr. Sanders and former Representative Beto O’Rourke generated in their campaigns’ first 24 hours as the high bar against which he will be measured.
Unlike those two rivals, Mr. Biden does not have an at-the-ready list of hundreds of thousands of contributors to ply for small donations. He must rely heavily, at least at first, upon an old-fashioned network of money bundlers – political insiders, former ambassadors and business executives who can expedite dozens, if not hundreds, of checks for $2,800 each, the legal maximum an individual can contribute in the primary.
But there is an inherent tension in the pursuit of big money in the current Democratic Party: the more of it that Mr. Biden gobbles up, the greater the risk of a backlash from a liberal base skeptical of the influence of the wealthy on the party. For Mr. Biden, in particular, it threatens to cut against a “Middle-Class Joe” image that is central to his electoral argument and appeal. Mr. Biden will enter the race already facing wariness from some on the left that he is a political and policy moderate with deep ties to moneyed donors and big companies, many of which are incorporated in Delaware, his home state…
Ed Rendell, the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, who is helping to put together a Biden fund-raiser later this week, said the “mad rush” by the news media to judge campaigns on their fund-raising was misplaced in a presidential contest because voters are paying such close attention.
“The one race, of all political races, where money is less important is president,” Mr. Rendell said, adding of Mr. Biden, “If he wins or loses it will not be because he raised – or didn’t – enough.”
The States
North Country Public Radio: Public campaign finance could take a while in New York
By Karen Dewitt
Public campaign financing could be coming to New York by the end of this year, now that Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the state Legislature have created a commission to come up with a plan.
Supporters say the current system favors a small group of big-money donors at the expense of the average citizen and needs to be changed. But not everyone agrees that is a good idea.
The recently created commission has until Dec. 1 to design a public financing system for all statewide offices. It can spend up to $100 million to set up the program…
[Sen. Rich] Funke and other Republicans, who are in the minority in the Legislature, are against using public dollars to pay for political campaigns. Funke said it costs too much.
“It will force taxpayers to subsidize negative campaigns and robocalls,” Funke said. “And it’s going to do nothing to clean up our system.”
Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Democrat, also has expressed reservations. And an April 16 poll by Siena College found nearly two-thirds of voters oppose the concept.
Once the commission releases its plan in December, the Legislature has 22 days to modify the plan or it automatically becomes law.
Kings County Politics: CFB Doling Out Of Taxpayer Dollars Challenged In 45th Special Election
By Kelly Mena
“Those funds make it easier for ordinary citizens to enter public life and run for office. With matching funds, candidates can run competitive campaigns even if they lack access to wealthy contributors, party bosses, lobbyists, or special interest groups. Hopeful candidates can build a viable campaign by relying on the support of their neighbors and constituents,” states the [New York City Campaign Finance Board’s] site.
But of the three candidates who received public financing, two including Monique Chandler-Waterman, who received $135,375, and Farah Louis, who received $135,375 in taxpayer dollars are the most politically connected in the race…
Chandler-Waterman has the backing of Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, among several Central Brooklyn lawmakers, while Louis has the backing of Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte (D-Ditmas Park, Flatbush), Kings County Democratic Party Boss Frank Seddio and high-powered Democratic Party Attorney Frank Carrone…
A closer look at big money donors shows a huge discrepancy in relative big money donors for a working/middle-class district that highly favors Chandler-Waterman and Louis, who both received public matching dollars over the more grassroots candidates in the district.
