In the News
Washington Post: California’s Attack on Free Speech
George F. Will
There the Democratic attorney general has decreed that all entities wishing to solicit tax-deductible contributions in California must disclose their donors to the state government. One such entity — unfortunately for the attorney general, but fortunately for the cause of freedom — is the Center for Competitive Politics. Its litigators are tenacious opponents of government attempts to appoint itself regulator of the marketplace of ideas.
The CCP asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit for protection from the attorney general’s decree. The appeals court sided with California’s attorney general, so the CCP is asking the Supreme Court to reverse the 9th Circuit and rebuke California’s attorney general. In doing so, the Supreme Court would be defending a doctrine adumbrated in decisions over six decades.
Wall Street Journal: Show Us Your Donors
Editorial Board
But in 2014 California Attorney General Kamala Harris began demanding that nonprofits turn over unredacted donor names as a condition of soliciting donors in California. The Center for Competitive Politics (CCP), a 501(c)(3) that works on election law, sued on grounds that compelling that disclosure violates the First Amendment (Center for Competitive Politics v. Harris).
Ms. Harris says the unredacted information is necessary so the state can see “whether an organization has violated the law, including laws against self-dealing, improper loans, interested persons, or illegal or unfair business practices.” But she doesn’t say how donor names and addresses help with that objective…
If government officials really need donor information to enforce the law, they can use the regular legal method of establishing cause to suspect a crime and subpoenaing additional information. The question for the Supreme Court is whether Americans still have a right to associate in private, or whether politicians can compel disclosure that chills speech and damages the First Amendment.
Washington Free Beacon: Nonprofit Asks Supreme Court to Protect Donors from California Regulator
Lachlan Markay
Harris has said she will not make that information public and that it will only be used for the attorney general’s internal compliance and enforcement activities. But CCP says there is no California statute that bars officials from publicly disclosing that information if Harris or some future attorney general decides to do so.
CCP issued a legal challenge to the regulation, which the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld last year as constitutional. “No case has ever held or implied that a disclosure requirement in and of itself constitutes First Amendment injury,” that court stated in its decision.
CCP responded by citing the Supreme Court’s landmark 1976 ruling in Buckley v. Valeo. “We have repeatedly found that compelled disclosure, in itself, can seriously infringe on privacy of association and belief guaranteed by the First Amendment,” the court stated in that case.
Equal Time
Wall Street Journal: The Donald On ‘SNL’: Equal Time Isn’t Needed
Babette Boliek and Derek T. Muller
Attorneys for NBC have updated the company’s Federal Communications Commission filings to note that Mrs. Clinton’s Oct. 3 appearance on “SNL” for 3 minutes and 12 seconds allows her primary opponents to demand equal airtime on the network. The doctrine, known as Section 315(a), does not compel broadcast stations to cover political candidates, but once a candidate appears on the air, stations are required to offer the same treatment to any rival who requests it.
The Radio Act of 1927 created the equal-time doctrine when airtime was a scarce commodity, so important for electoral success that federal regulation was deemed the only way to protect the public interest.
Lawmakers’ intention was to foster debate. But in practice the doctrine often has the opposite effect. In 1952, for example, the criteria to qualify under the equal-time doctrine were so broad that they covered presidential candidates from 16 minor political parties. That meant stations could not give time to Democrats or Republicans without potentially providing the same amount of time to candidates from the Socialist Party or the Prohibition Party. As a result, broadcasters shied away from political candidates.
Independent Groups
Bloomberg: Some Supreme Doubts on Super-PACs
Francis Wilkinson
Are they flouting the law? Clearly. Breaking it? Who would rouse themselves to pass judgment? Congress has abandoned lawmaking on campaigns altogether as issues that used to have broad support — such as full disclosure of contributions — now break along hard partisan lines.
The Federal Election Commission, which makes Congress look bipartisan by comparison, no longer pretends to function. A hobbled Internal Revenue Service, which is responsible for investigating abuses of the tax code, some of which are designed to funnel money illegally into politics, has been cowed into submission by budget cuts and a conservative campaign to portray it as an arm of partisan aggression.
U.S. News & World Report: The Beginning of the End of the Super PAC?
Ron Fein
And now we’re beginning to see some pushback. The low-hanging fruit is “coordination.” The Supreme Court has long recognized that political spending that’s “coordinated” with the candidate’s campaign isn’t really “independent,” and defining “coordination” more sharply can limit the most egregious super PAC abuses. For example, California recently passed tough new anti-coordination rules, and the Department of Justice actually prosecuted one former congressional campaign manager for coordinating with a super PAC…
But there may be new cracks in the SpeechNow foundation. In late September, a federal judge in New Jersey issued an important decision rejecting what might be called a “SpeechNow defense” to federal bribery charges against New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez… Notably, the alleged bribes included $600,000 in mid-2012 contributions to Majority PAC, an “independent” super PAC that supported Menendez’s 2012 race.
New York Review of Books: Free Speech, Big Money, Bad Elections
David Cole
As Burt Neuborne, a professor at NYU Law School, puts it in his important and timely book on the First Amendment, Madison’s Music, the super-rich, the wealthiest one to two percent, “set the national political agenda, select the candidates, bankroll the campaigns…, and enjoy privileged postelection access to government officials.” The rest of us are left to “navigate among the choices made available” by the super-rich.
Only about 40 to 60 percent of citizens vote in any given presidential election. The rest, who are disproportionately poor and members of minorities, do not even participate. Some are impeded from voting by unnecessarily stringent registration and voter identification requirements as well as narrow time windows for voting, long lines, and other obstacles. Many others have likely concluded that in view of the outsized influence of the rich, their votes wouldn’t matter.
Huffington Post: A Social Justice Case for Campaign Finance Reform
Talmon J. Smith
Campaign finance reform is a school of thought that argues for de-concentrating, rearranging, or altogether eradicating the involvement of ‘big’ corporate and private money in politics. It’s goals are to ensure that those in public office are public servants in truth, that democracy is truly representative, and that political discourse is honestly motivated.
The question for campaign finance reformers going forward is whether they can sell the issue — and its wonky, distant, elitist-sounding name — as a matter of social justice intrinsic to equality of citizenship, then turn it into a ‘ballot box’ issue.
The political establishment would be deeply impacted if citizens deeply committed to social justice — who count it among their goals to uplift the disempowered and diminish white elitism in all its crony capitalistic supremacist forms — promoted campaign finance reform to the forefront of their rallying calls.
Candidates and Campaigns
Politico: Trump courted mega-donors he now scorns
Kenneth Vogel and Ben Schreckinger
Donald Trump has spent much of his presidential campaign bashing his GOP rivals as beholden to major donors, and, in recent weeks, he’s expanded his attacks to include three major donors in particular ― Sheldon Adelson, Paul Singer and the Koch brothers.
But POLITICO has learned that Trump or his surrogates have sought to build relationships ― if not support ― from all three, calling into question the billionaire real estate showman’s repeated assertions that, because of his wealth, he has no use for major donors.
New York Times: Donald Trump to Run His First Campaign Ads… on the Radio
Maggie Haberman
An independent media buyer who tracks the ad wars said that Mr. Trump’s initial spending on his ads was through Nov. 10, the day of the next Republican presidential debate, totaling just over $13,000 for 11 radio markets in the three states.
The States
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Senate GOP reaches deal on campaign finance, elections oversight
Patrick Marley and Jason Stein
Making an apparent breakthrough, Republicans in the state Senate plan to modify legislation Friday that would overhaul campaign finance laws and the agency that runs elections.
That sets the stage for the measures to get to GOP Gov. Scott Walker by next week.
One Republican lawmaker who has been briefed on the changes said one would require a new ethics commission to include two former judges.
Myranda Tanck, a spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau), on Tuesday announced the plans to meet Friday, but declined to say what changes to the legislation could be in store. She said details may not be available until Thursday, a day before the Senate is to vote.
Wisconsin Public Radio: Assembly Democrats Propose Constitutional Amendment On Campaign Finance
Gilman Halsted
Democratic state legislators are trying out a new strategy in their effort to block Republican plans to rewrite campaign finance laws: amending the state constitution.
Last week, Assembly Democrats tried and failed to amend a Republican bill that allows for unlimited corporate contributions to political parties. Rep. Steve Doyle, D-Onalaska, said Wednesday that a constitutional amendment they’re now proposing would bar legislators from changing campaign finance rules in a way that benefits their own re-election committees in an election year.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: GAB’s Kevin Kennedy is in denial
Kyle Maichle
Numerous emails revealing the conduct of GAB have been made public during subsequent lawsuits filed by activists and organizations targeted by the John Doe investigation. The documentation showed the state’s elections and ethics agency engaged in highly partisan behavior during the investigation. Additional evidence surfaced of GAB staff using personal email accounts to evade disclosure of their investigative activities under the state’s public records law.
These revelations forced both houses of the Wisconsin Legislature to take drastic action to ensure this sort of behavior does not happen again. State Rep. Dean Knudson (R-Hudson) and state Sen. Leah Vukmir (R-Wauwatosa) introduced a bill to overhaul the GAB and replace it with two separate commissions for elections and ethics. State Rep. Dave Craig (R-Big Bend) and state Sen. Thomas Tiffany (R-Hazelhurst) introduced legislation to end the use of John Doe proceedings for alleged campaign finance crimes. The legislation passed both the Assembly and Senate on Oct. 21.
