FEC
Roll Call: Senate panel approves nominees to fill all FEC vacancies
By Kate Ackley
The Senate Rules and Administration panel took a big step toward restoring a full slate at the Federal Election Commission, approving three nominees by voice vote Thursday.
If confirmed by the full Senate, the two Republicans and one Democrat would restore the beleaguered agency to its full slate of six commissioners.
Shana M. Broussard, the Democrats’ pick, who currently serves as counsel to FEC Commissioner Steven Walther, would be the agency’s first Black commissioner in its 45-year history.
President Donald Trump formally nominated Broussard in late October, along with a Republican pick: Sean J. Cooksey, who serves as general counsel to Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. The third nominee, whom the administration had previously picked, is Allen Dickerson, legal director of the Institute for Free Speech, which favors deregulation of campaign finance…
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell noted during the committee’s votes that the FEC had been created, in the aftermath of the 1970s Watergate scandal, to have three Democrats and three Republicans. He said Democrats’ sweeping election and campaigns overhaul bill, dubbed HR 1, would change that ratio to 3-2, and he reiterated his opposition to that bill.
The Courts
Courthouse News: Campaign Expenses
A federal judge ruled the Campaign Legal Center lacks standing to bring a claim under the Federal Election Campaign Act that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and a super PAC unlawfully coordinated on over $6 million of the PAC’s expenditures. The center has no cognizable interest in a legal determination of whether the expenditures were coordinated, and therefore cannot challenge the FEC’s decision not to investigate.
Congress
Heritage: The “For the People Act” Demonstrates the Flaws of Progressive Campaign Finance Reform
By John York
Although it has little chance of becoming law in this Congress, the For the People Act of 2019, better known as H.R. 1, is not going away. The bill, which is an amalgam of nearly every ill-fated reform bill from the past several decades, has already spawned several narrower pieces of legislation. Each of the bill’s provisions-from clamping down on independent expenditures to imposing greater disclosure requirements-represents a serious threat to the freedom of speech. Right-minded reformers should seek to increase, rather than curtail, the sources and amount of political speech in the public square.
NLRB
Business Insider: The US labor board accused Google of illegally spying on employee activists, firing them, and blocking workers from organizing
By Hugh Langley and Isobel Asher Hamilton
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on Wednesday issued a complaint accusing Google of violating several labor laws during a crackdown on worker activism last year.
According to the NLRB’s complaint, Google “virtually surveilled” and then interrogated workers engaging in employee activism, and later fired them.
DNI
Wall Street Journal: China Is National Security Threat No. 1
By John Ratcliffe
If I could communicate one thing to the American people from this unique vantage point [as Director of National Intelligence], it is that the People’s Republic of China poses the greatest threat to America today, and the greatest threat to democracy and freedom world-wide since World War II…
China already suppresses U.S. web content that threatens the Communist Party’s ideological control, and it is developing offensive cyber capabilities against the U.S. homeland. This year China engaged in a massive influence campaign that included targeting several dozen members of Congress and congressional aides.
Consider this scenario: A Chinese-owned manufacturing facility in the U.S. employs several thousand Americans. One day, the plant’s union leader is approached by a representative of the Chinese firm. The businessman explains that the local congresswoman is taking a hard-line position on legislation that runs counter to Beijing’s interests-even though it has nothing to do with the industry the company is involved in-and says the union leader must urge her to shift positions or the plant and all its jobs will soon be gone.
The union leader contacts his congresswoman and indicates that his members won’t support her re-election without a change in position. He tells himself he’s protecting his members, but in that moment he’s doing China’s bidding, and the congresswoman is being influenced by China, whether she realizes it or not.
Our intelligence shows that Beijing regularly directs this type of influence operation in the U.S. I briefed the House and Senate Intelligence committees that China is targeting members of Congress with six times the frequency of Russia and 12 times the frequency of Iran.
Online Speech Platforms
Washington Post: Facebook to start policing anti-Black hate speech more aggressively than anti-White comments, documents show
By Elizabeth Dwoskin, Nitasha Tiku, and Heather Kelly
Facebook is embarking on a major overhaul of its algorithms that detect hate speech, according to internal documents, reversing years of so-called “race-blind” practices.
Those practices resulted in the company being more vigilant about removing slurs lobbed against White users while flagging and deleting innocuous posts by people of color on the platform.
The overhaul, which is known as the WoW Project and is in its early stages, involves re-engineering Facebook’s automated moderation systems to get better at detecting and automatically deleting hateful language that is considered “the worst of the worst,” according to internal documents describing the project obtained by The Washington Post. The “worst of the worst” includes slurs directed at Blacks, Muslims, people of more than one race, the LGBTQ community and Jews, according to the documents…
In the first phase of the project, which was announced internally to a small group in October, engineers said they had changed the company’s systems to deprioritize policing contemptuous comments about “Whites,” “men” and “Americans.” …
“We can’t combat systemic racism if we can’t talk about it, and challenging white supremacy and White men is an important part of having dialogue about racism,” said Danielle Citron, a law professor specializing in free speech at Boston University Law School, who also reviewed the documents. “But you can’t have the conversation if it is being filtered out, bizarrely, by overly blunt hate speech algorithms.”
New York Times: Facebook says it will remove coronavirus vaccine misinformation.
By Mike Isaac
Facebook on Thursday said it would remove posts that contain claims about Covid-19 vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts, as the social network acts more aggressively to bat down coronavirus misinformation while falsehoods run rampant.
The move goes a step beyond how Facebook had handled misinformation about other kinds of vaccines. The company had previously made it more difficult to find vaccine misinformation that was not related to the coronavirus by “downranking” it, essentially making it less visible in people’s news feeds.
But Facebook said it planned to take down Covid-19 vaccine falsehoods entirely if the claims had been discredited or contradicted by health groups including the World Health Organization, the United States Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“This is another way that we are applying our policy to remove misinformation about the virus that could lead to imminent physical harm,” the company said in a blog post. “This could include false claims about the safety, efficacy, ingredients or side effects of the vaccines.”
Facebook added that it would also take down “false claims that Covid-19 vaccines contain microchips, or anything else that isn’t on the official vaccine ingredient list.”
The Hill: YouTube to warn users before posting comments that may be offensive
By Chris Mills Rodrigo
YouTube will begin warning users before they post comments that may be offensive to other people, the company announced Thursday.
The new feature is part of the video-sharing platform’s efforts to address widespread racist and homophobic harassment targeted at creators by commenters and other accounts.
YouTube will also begin proactively asking users to provide demographic information in an effort to find patterns of hate speech “that may affect some communities more than others.” …
A study conducted by OpenWeb and Google’s AI conversation platform released in September attempted to quantify the effects of comment feedback by analyzing 400,000 comments on news websites.
The study found that for roughly a third of commenters, seeing a warning caused them to revise their comments. A little over half of those who edited their comments changed them in a way that no longer violated community standards, while roughly a quarter simply reworked their comments to avoid triggering the automated system.
Thirty-six percent of users exposed to the warnings posted the comment anyways.
Biden Transition
American Prospect: Why Is Biden Raising Millions in Corporate Cash for a Virtual Inauguration?
By David Dayen
Biden’s inaugural committee has barred fossil fuel companies, and their executives and PACs, from donating to the inaugural committee. But that only intensifies the question: if there’s a problem with those particular firms giving money, why isn’t there a problem with other ones that also rely on the actions of the government? …
Inaugural funding is usually put toward the production of gala balls, crowd control and port-a-potties on the National Mall, the staging of associated inaugural events, and the like. During the pandemic, with large indoor gatherings altogether out the window and probably large outdoor gatherings as well, none of those things are likely to be happening. There are livestreaming production costs, but those are relatively modest. So what exactly will cost millions of dollars?
“It’s excessive and wholly unnecessary. Most of the events are going to be on Zoom,” says Craig Holman, ethics and campaign finance expert for Public Citizen. “I was expecting Biden to return to the very noble inaugural that Thomas Jefferson had: he walked to the Capitol, gave his speech, and walked home.”\
Of course, Holman notes, corporations give to the inaugural committee for ulterior motives. “The donors aren’t giving so Biden can have a great inauguration,” he says. “They’re giving to befriend the president and his inner circle. This is perhaps one of the most obvious ways where corporations can chip in money at the feet of the president to ingratiate themselves.”
The States
Hollywood Reporter: Donald Trump Stands Up for Legal Right to Retweet a Meme
By Eriq Gardner
Trump might…be the very first individual to test New York’s brand-new law guarding the sanctity of free speech. Represented by Charles Harder, Trump is now standing up for the right to retweet a meme.
The meme in question comes from Logan Cook, who goes by the internet handle “CarpeDonktum.”
Cook found a video online of two toddlers…running together along a sidewalk. He then used it to create his own “breaking news” story…
In September, the parents of the toddlers in the video filed suit against both Trump and Cook and alleged that the exploitation of the childrens’ image had violated New York privacy and publicity right law and was both an intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress.
So now comes Trump’s anti-SLAPP motion…
Trump’s main contention is that the lawsuit aims to suppress his free speech rights “by seeking to punish them for doing nothing more than re-posting and re-tweeting a parody meme with a political message.”
“The First Amendment allows others to create parody memes of footage that Plaintiffs themselves published,” writes Harder.
Miami Herald: Disgraced Republican lawmaker planted no-party candidate in key Senate race, sources say
By Ana Ceballos and Samantha J. Gross
The confession came on election night.
Over drinks at an Irish pub in Seminole County, as television screens began to show the latest election results for key state Senate races, former Miami state Sen. Frank Artiles was getting excited.
Miami Republican Ileana Garcia, a first-time candidate, was leading Democratic incumbent Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez in the race to represent Miami-Dade’s Senate District 37. It was tight, but she was winning. And Artiles wanted to brag.
“That is me, that was all me,” Artiles told a crowd at Liam Fitzpatrick’s restaurant in Lake Mary, where Sen. Jason Brodeur was holding his election night party, according to a person who was there and who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation…
Artiles boasted that he planted a no-party candidate in the Miami-Dade Senate race, which Garcia won after a three-day recount by just 32 votes out of more than 215,000 cast. Artiles recruited Alexis (Alex) Rodriguez, a longtime acquaintance and Facebook friend.
Sources with direct knowledge have indicated that Artiles’ involvement in launching Rodriguez’s bid was extensive…
The no-party candidate with the same surname as the incumbent Democrat had been a registered Republican until just before his qualifying papers were filed to make him a candidate for the Florida Senate.
Center Square: Florida GOP official: Third-party candidates help Republicans win ‘many’ elections
By John Haughey
Internal jostling for leadership of Florida’s Republican Party has shaken loose a revelation bolstering allegations the GOP regularly runs third-party candidates funded by “dark money” shadow groups to win elections.
In an email sent Tuesday to all Florida GOP committee members, former state representative and current Lee County Property Appraiser Matt Caldwell ripped the party’s leadership for failing to support incumbents and for placing elected state officials…in charge.
Caldwell, defeated by Democrat Nikki Fried in the 2018 state agriculture commissioner election by 6,753 votes, blamed his loss on the state party’s neglect.
“The most glaring difference in the loss for Ag. Commissioner was the lack of any 3rd party candidate” in his race against Fried as, he implied, the state party did for candidates in four other statewide races, including Gov. Ron DeSantis’ half-percent victory over Democrat Andrew Gillum.
In fact, he added, “Many of our victories can be attributed to 3rd Party candidates dividing the vote.”
CT Examiner: Audit finds Lax Oversight of Public Campaign Financing
By Emilia Otte
For the last nine years, the State Election Enforcement Commission has failed to report the use of grant money financing candidates running for the Connecticut General Assembly, according to a recent audit report…
By law, the commission must report annually on the amount of money in the fund and the number of people who have contributed to it. The commission is also required to present an analysis each cycle to the General Assembly of the amount of grant money issued, how campaigns have spent the money, and how much leftover money was returned to the fund.
According to the audit, the commission has not provided these reports in the years between 2009 and 2018.
[T]he commission explained the failures as a matter of “staffing shortages and a related backlog of cases, as well as legislative changes to the docketing process and administration of the Citizens’ Election Program.”
