Supreme Court

Salon: Justice Alito complains, but the evidence is clear: This Supreme Court was built by dark money

By Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse

Americans’ perception that the court lacks independence, and the court’s related drop in approval, doesn’t flow from some left-wing conspiracy. It’s a recognition that the evidence shows a pattern whenever certain interests come before the court. 

How strong a pattern? During Chief Justice John Roberts’ tenure, the Court has issued more than 80 partisan decisions, by either a 5-4 or 6-3 vote, involving big interests important to Republican Party major donors. Republican-appointed justices have handed wins to the donor interests in every single case. The decisions greenlit rampant voter suppression and bulk gerrymandering (Shelby County v. Holder and Husted v. Randolph Institute); closed courthouse doors to workers wronged by their employers (Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis); unleashed floods of dark money to corrupt our politics and foul our democracy (Citizens United v. FEC and Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta); and more. Eighty to zero is a pattern so strong that it could serve as compelling evidence in a trial alleging bias and discrimination.

This pattern did not just happen. It is the fruit of a half-century-long operation by right-wing donors to win through the Supreme Court what they can’t win through elected branches of government.

Nonprofits

Newsweek: Stop Treating Left-Wing Advocacy Groups Like Charities

By J.D. Vance

Here’s a simple proposal: any charitable organization with an endowment over $100 million must spend 20 percent of its endowment each year, or else it loses its 501c3 status and the preferential treatment of its income. This would allow colleges and other secular nonprofits to maintain an endowment without accumulating a war chest of money. And it would encourage “charities” to spend a little more time on their core mission and a little less time manipulating and influencing capital markets. Last year, the Ford Foundation earned $3.6 billion in income on its $16 billion endowment, yet it only spent $1 billion on program activities. No one can claim with a straight face that this is a charity, and the rules we make for charities should reflect this reality.

Our laws should promote organizations that serve our society, and reduce the power of those that harm it. The Ford Foundation and the Harvard endowment don’t have a constitutional right to tax advantages that are unavailable to the vast majority of American citizens. They have amassed a fortune that is used as a weapon against conservatives (and even moderates) in the media, the academy and in business.

New York Post: Zuckerberg’s election spending was ‘carefully orchestrated’ to influence 2020 vote: ex-FEC member

By Steven Nelson and Bruce Golding

A former federal election official on Thursday called the $400 million-plus that Mark Zuckerberg spent to help finance local elections a “carefully orchestrated attempt” to influence the 2020 vote — and recommended that all states ban private funding of election offices.

Hans von Spakovsky, a former Federal Election Commission member, said the billionaire Facebook founder’s donations to a pair of nonprofits that doled out the cash to nearly 2,500 counties in 49 states “violated fundamental principles of equal treatment of voters since it may have led to unequal opportunities to vote in different areas of a state.”

“My reaction is that this was a carefully orchestrated attempt to convert official government election offices into get-out-the-vote operations for one political party and to insert political operatives into election offices in order to influence and manipulate the outcome of the election,” said von Spakovsky, a Republican who now runs the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative.

He added: “All states should ban private funding of government election offices no matter the source.”

Online Speech Platforms

Reason: Facebook Welcomes Regulations, Specifically Those That Hurt Its Competition

By Joe Lancaster

Nick Clegg, Facebook’s head of global affairs and communications, appeared on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday after a harrowing week for the company…

When asked by host Dana Bash if he supported “amending Section 230” in order to “hold companies like [Facebook] liable” for certain posts made on their sites, Clegg responded that he did, and recommended “mak[ing] that protection…contingent on them applying…their policies as they’re supposed to, and if they fail to do that, they would then have that liability protection removed.”

What, exactly, does that mean in practice? “You tell me, because it makes no sense to me,” says Jeff Kosseff, a cybersecurity law professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and author of The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet, a book about the history and application of Section 230…

Any potential repeal or revision, however, would likely only serve to insulate Facebook as the world’s most popular social media site, as well as to discourage competitors.

“Section 230 was vital to Facebook’s creation, and its growth,” Kosseff explains, “but now that it’s a trillion-dollar company, Section 230 is perhaps a bit less important to Facebook, but it is far more important to smaller sites. Facebook can handle defending a bunch of defamation cases on the merits much more than a site like Yelp or Glassdoor.”

New York Times: YouTube’s stronger election misinformation policies had a spillover effect on Twitter and Facebook, researchers say.

By Davey Alba

YouTube’s stricter policies against election misinformation was followed by sharp drops in the prevalence of false and misleading videos on Facebook and Twitter, according to new research released on Thursday, underscoring the video service’s power across social media.

Researchers at the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University found a significant rise in election fraud YouTube videos shared on Twitter immediately after the Nov. 3 election. In November, those videos consistently accounted for about one-third of all election-related video shares on Twitter…

But the proportion of election fraud claims shared on Twitter dropped sharply after Dec. 8. That was the day YouTube said it would remove videos that promoted the unfounded theory that widespread errors and fraud changed the outcome of the presidential election…

The proportion fell further after Jan. 7, when YouTube announced that any channels that violated its election misinformation policy would receive a “strike,” and that channels that received three strikes in a 90-day period would be permanently removed. By Inauguration Day, the proportion was around 5 percent.

The trend was replicated on Facebook.