Free Speech
Daily Caller: Liberals Launch Their Latest War On Free Speech
By Dan Backer
Whether it’s tagging legitimate news stories they disagree with as “fake news” or launching increasingly-violent protests to shut down opposing viewpoints, it’s clear: the left is gearing up their war on free speech.
Like most wars premised on indoctrination, young adults are the ones being overtly radicalized. Protected by tenure, radical leftists seemingly dominate most institutions of higher learning. Once a free marketplace of ideas, today’s academia seems increasingly a modern inquisition against any who challenge the increasingly cult-like radicalism being infused into the minds of college students. According to a recent Gallup survey, a whopping 38% of college students now think the government should ban all “offensive” speech. What they find offensive, of course, is any remark outside of politically-correct liberal orthodoxy. And they protest – riot – for it…
A free society is predicated on free speech and free association – democracy can only persevere if everyone can speak their mind, even if some find it offensive.
Disclosure
Daily Signal: How Some State Politicians Are Using Government to Threaten Free Speech
By Jeremy Cady and Dan Caldwell
When it comes to threatening the free speech rights of American citizens, progressives have largely been the culprits at the federal level.
Yet increasingly, Republican state legislators have taken up this crusade…
In addition to compelling private organizations to disclose their supporters, some measures, like those in South Dakota and Missouri, also give tremendous power to state ethics commissions.
While seemingly benign, charging these bodies with regulating and enforcing disclosures poses a significant threat to private citizens’ right to support causes in which they believe…
Anonymous speech has been part of the American political tradition since our founding. In “Common Sense,” “the Federalist Papers,” and other works, anonymity allowed ideas to be spoken without threat of intimidation and heard without bias.
Politicians who advance disclosure laws are showing they would rather attack the speaker than debate issues and ideas on their merits. This is corrosive to our democratic process. Anonymous speech is not.
International Business Times: Corporate Lobbying By ExxonMobil Could Be Exposed At Annual Shareholders Meeting
By Josh Keefe
On Wednesday, ExxonMobil investors are scheduled to gather in Dallas for the company’s annual shareholder meeting. There they will vote on nine shareholder proposals, one of which would require the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas company to fully disclose its spending on state and federal lobbying.
The proposal, which is part of a broad movement by investors to force companies to disclose their direct and indirect lobbying efforts, would force the oil giant to reveal payments to trade associations that critics say allow the company to publicly claim to support efforts to address climate change while secretly funding lobbying opposing those efforts.
Wednesday’s vote will represent the fifth straight year of the United Steelworkers of America, which represents 2,500 workers at seven ExxonMobil sites, has submitted a lobbying disclosure proposal to the oil giant. While previous efforts have been unsuccessful – only a quarter of shareholders supported last year’s proposal – former CEO Rex Tillerson’s ascension to Secretary of State and multiple state investigations into allegations the company misled investors about climate change have renewed interest in ExxonMobil’s political influence.
Trump Administration
New York Times: White House Details Ethics Waivers for Ex-Lobbyists and Corporate Lawyers
By Eric Lipton and Steve Eder
President Trump has given at least 16 White House staff members dispensation to work on policy matters they handled while employed as lobbyists or to interact with their former colleagues in private-sector jobs, according to records released late Wednesday.
The details on these so-called ethics waivers – more than five times the number granted in the first four months of the Obama administration – were made public after an intense dispute between the White House and the Office of Government Ethics, which had been pushing the Trump administration to stop granting such waivers in secret…
In an executive order signed in late January establishing his own ethics rules for his political appointees, Mr. Trump adopted, word for word, much of the language in Mr. Obama’s ethics rules, with one important exception: He dropped the broad ban on hiring just-departed lobbyists.
The waivers show that Mr. Trump is also instituting the ethics rules in a very different way. He is allowing former industry lobbyists who worked for for-profit concerns to, in some cases, take up the same topics they had handled in the private sector.
Candidates and Campaigns
CNBC: Hillary Clinton: ‘I take responsibility for every decision I made, but that’s not why I lost’
By Anita Balakrishnan
“Weaponized information” was one of the key factors that swung the U.S. election, former presidential candidate and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday…
Clinton also said that the majority of content surrounding the election was “fake news,” originated in Russia. She also alluded to data firm Cambridge Analytica, which has said it helped Donald Trump’s campaign.
“We did not engage in false content,” Clinton said. “We weren’t in the same category as the other side.” (There have been false stories from both political stances, according to analysis from BuzzFeed News.)
Clinton said that she did not inherit a strong data foundation from the Democratic party, which was “bankrupt” and near “insolvent.”…
Clinton also pointed to the flow of money into the Democrats’ “horrible” data deficiency. She pointed to the popularity of conservative documentaries on Netflix, and the “unaccountable” money related to the decision of Citizens United v. FEC.
“Democrats give money to candidates – they want a personal connection,” Clinton said. “Republicans build institutions.”
The States
Missourinet: Missouri AG Hawley breaks with GOP leaders in appeal of court judgement
By Jason Taylor
Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley has broken with prominent Republican interests in announcing he’s appealing a court decision over campaign contributions.
The law firm of state GOP Chairman Todd Graves headed a suit against Amendment 2, a popular ballot initiative passed by voters in last November’s election.
The measure restricted candidate donations to $2,600 and party contributions to $25,000. It also prohibited contributions between political action committees (“PAC’s”) and some other committee transfers. That portion of the amendment was overturned earlier this month by a federal district court in Kansas City.
The court’s Senior Judge Ortrie D. Smith also held that Amendment 2 unconstitutionally excluded certain corporations from contributing to PAC’s, and further struck down the amendment’s ban on corporations and labor unions making contributions campaign committees.
Graves’ law firm – Graves Garrett – applauded the partial judgement in its favor as “an example of federal judiciary’s essential role in protecting First Amendment Rights from infringement by states.”
JD Supra: Is New Jersey’s Regulated-Industry Ban on Political Contributions Ripe for Challenge?
By Avi Kelin
Since 1911, New Jersey law has prohibited the making of political contributions by such highly regulated industries as banks, utilities, and insurance companies…
In early May of 2017, in Free and Fair Election Fund, et al. v. Missouri Ethics Commission, et al., the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri declared unconstitutional a provision of Missouri campaign-finance law that prohibited banks, insurance companies, and telephone companies from making any political contributions to PACs. (Missouri law already prohibits all contributions to candidates and political parties from corporations, without regard to whether the corporations in engaged in a heavily regulated industry.) The court determined that this complete ban on contributions from heavily regulated industries is unconstitutional because the law was not closely drawn to avoid abridging First Amendment rights to engage in the political process…
This issue is far from settled, as Missouri’s Attorney General announced that he will appeal the court’s decision, and there are key differences between New Jersey’s regulated-industry ban and Missouri’s regulated-industry ban and New Jersey campaign-finance law and Missouri campaign-finance law. However, the Free and Fair Election Fund decision begs the question whether New Jersey’s regulated-industry ban is ripe for challenge.
Texas Tribune: Ethics reform not swept under rug, but not sweeping either
By Jay Root
Elected officials who commit felonies while abusing their office will lose their public pensions. State officers and politicians who make money from government contracts will finally have to reveal their relationships. And lawmakers who leave the Legislature with fat campaign accounts will be restricted from using the cash to prop themselves up as lobbyists…
The governor is expected to sign the three major ethics bills that made it to his desk.
But there were another three on his priority list, all focused on lobbyists, that didn’t make it. Nor did a few far-reaching ethics proposals that weren’t on the top leaders’ anointed list but had the backing of watchdogs – like barring the governor from appointing his big donors to state posts or exposing the sources of so-called “dark money” given to candidates by politically active nonprofits.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has expressed opposition to requiring disclosure of dark money, saying it’s a violation of free speech rights. The bill curbing the influence of big gubernatorial donors passed the House but never moved an inch in Patrick’s Texas Senate.
McClatchy DC: Tempe resumes push to restrict influence of election money
By Associated Press
Some Tempe officials are continuing a push to restrict the influence of money in elections beyond state law.
The Arizona Capitol Times reports that the movement has gained traction after measures to publicly fund city elections failed to garner enough support to pass in 2015.
After the plan failed, the city’s Clean Election Working Group morphed into the Campaign Finance Working Group and will meet on June 13 to discuss further transparency efforts.
Gov. Doug Ducey recently signed off on the city’s charter amendment that limits the amount of money individuals and political action committees can contribute to a candidate.
But Goldwater Institute attorney Jim Manley says contribution limits stifle free speech and that Tempe’s limits are meaningless because the charter amendment doesn’t place limits on independent expenditure committees.
Los Angeles Times: Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra needs to get moving on an Exxon Mobil probe
By Editorial Board
Becerra has not responded to entreaties by 18 Democrats in California’s congressional delegation and more than 30 environmental groups, some of which read his silence as a lack of action. Becerra’s office said last week that he “is aware of the public interest in this matter” but declined comment on whether it has an investigation underway. If it doesn’t, it should. Attorneys general in New York and Massachusetts already have gone public with their inquiries, based on state securities and fraud laws similar to those on California’s books…
After the public revelations of Exxon Mobil’s seeming duplicity, attorneys general from more than a dozen states met in March 2016 with environmentalists charting a challenge of the oil industry following the anti-tobacco campaign playbook. By then, New York had already opened an investigation; following the meeting, Massachusetts issued its own subpoenas. After fighting off Exxon Mobil efforts to quash the subpoenas, lawyers in both states are poring over about 1 million pages of Exxon Mobil records. The U.S. Virgin Islands also issued subpoenas, but the tiny territory backed down in the face of expensive court challenges by Exxon Mobil. That’s partly why it’s imperative that California and other states with sizable legal staffs work together to counter Exxon Mobil’s deep pockets.
