CCP
Massachusetts Businesses and Labor Unions Are Entitled to the Same Free Speech Rights
By Joe Albanese
The ability of businesses and unions to participate in electoral politics has long been a contentious topic, particularly in the years since Citizens United v. FEC, which struck down a federal ban on independent expenditures from those entities, but not a ban on direct donations from businesses and unions to candidates and parties, which still stands on the federal level.
State laws sometimes differ in this approach. In Massachusetts, for example, unions are allowed to donate up to $15,000 per year to candidates – 15 times more than the state’s limit on donations by individuals. Businesses, however, are not allowed to give even one penny directly to a candidate’s campaign…
This double standard has prompted two Massachusetts businesses to challenge the law in state court…
That unions and businesses are different entities is obvious, but it is questionable that the political speech of each group is any different. It seems more likely that this double standard exists because of the decidedly partisan split between them.
Free Speech
New York Times: Twitter Has the Right to Suspend Donald Trump. But It Shouldn’t.
By Farhad Manjoo
As online services like Twitter become the world’s primary place for political dialogue, the rules they set up for policing political speech will have a wide-ranging impact – they could be used to ban not just billionaire presidents-elect, but also activists and dissidents across the globe.
As several free speech advocates told me, it would be difficult for Twitter to enforce a rule that bans Mr. Trump’s tweets but does not also censor speech generally. Given that we are now entering an era dominated by right-wing nationalism, these rules could well come to backfire on the progressives urging Twitter to suspend Mr. Trump.
“The problem is not necessarily in what he’s saying but that he’s the president saying it,” said Jillian York, a free speech advocate at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “If that sort of speech were censored for everyone, I would have a big problem with it,” she said. “It would be very much a violation of the spirit of freedom of expression to not allow me to critique a union leader or a journalist or a president.”
Vox: Opposition to “offensive” speech on campuses will ultimately burn dissidents
By Anthony L. Fisher
PEN America, the literary and human rights association that lists as one of its core principles a commitment to “protect open expression in the United States and worldwide,” set out to explore the state of free speech on the nation’s campuses – re-examining several high-profile incidents and controversies…
In perhaps the most cogent line of the entire report, the authors write: “Overreaction to problematic speech may impoverish the environment for speech for all.” In the name of social justice, some students are demanding administrators become the arbiters of what speech is legitimate and what isn’t. These students don’t seem to grasp that by granting authority figures the power to adjudicate which speakers have the right to be heard, they will inevitably find their own speech silenced when opponents claim offense, fear, or discomfort.
It’s already happening. Just ask the Palestinian activists whose boycott campaigns against Israel have been deemed hate speech by a number of public universities, and whose future political activities could be endangered by an act of Congress.
By Nick Gillespie and Meredith Bragg
On December 6 at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., Reason’s Nick Gillespie and Danish journalist Flemming Rose discussed “Free Speech in the Age of Trump.” That conversation, moderated by Kat Murti, is the newest Reason Podcast…
Rose talked about the response to the Mohammed cartoons and what he sees as a failure on the part of many countries to uphold Enlightenment values of open inquiry and peaceful toleration of dissent. Gillespie described last year’s attempt by a federal prosecutor to subpoena Reason.com for information about blog commenters who joked about attacking the judge in The Silk Road trial of Ross Ulbricht.
With a president who has pledged to “open up” the country’s libel laws while shutting down parts of the internet, what are the prospects for a free and flourishing marketplace of ideas in Donald Trump’s America? Throw in the ongoing idiocy of political correctness on college campuses and corporate HR departments, and it turns out that there’s plenty to worry about.
Disclosure
Albany Times Union: Citizens Union sues Cuomo, Schneiderman, JCOPE over disclosure requirements
By Casey Seiler
Claiming that newly passed disclosure requirements are burdensome and chilling to free speech, the good government group Citizens Union has filed a federal lawsuit naming Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, the members of the state Joint Commission on Public Ethics and its executive director Seth Agata as defendants.
“This law intends to silence nonprofits that criticize elected officials by affecting their ability to raise funds and should not be allowed to stand,” Citizens Union said in a statement.
At issue are disclosures required by legislation passed in the wee hours of the final day of the most recent legislative session. Those measures that were seen by Citizens Union and similar groups as a woeful excuse for the longed-for comprehensive reform that might have been attained after what was described as “Albany’s Watergate moment” – the back-to-back convictions of former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos.
The Media
Bloomberg: Let Trump’s Election Stand
By Megan McArdle
But it’s rarely constructive policy to set out to just do “something” in reaction to a horrifying event; you have to do a specific thing, ideally with good reasoning behind that specific thing. And you need to take care that that specific thing does not create problems even worse than the one it was meant to address.
For example, at a panel last week, I was asked what we should do about fake news. Much of the audience was unhappy with my answer: “Nothing.” I’m not too happy with it either. But this sort of news is often hosted outside the U.S., and it propagates through multiple channels — websites, e-mail, social media. Imagine the government apparatus you’d have to create, and the powers you’d have to give it, to prohibit people from sharing links to those websites with each other. Then imagine what could be done with those sorts of powers. By someone like Trump. Better to do nothing about the problem of fake news than to create an even-worse problem.
Trump Administration
USA Today: Trump administration is a scandal in waiting
By Craig Holman
No administration in history has been as fraught with financial conflicts of interest as the incoming Trump administration, from the president-elect on down. If steps are not taken to manage these conflicts, the Trump administration is likely to become one of the most scandal-ridden in memory.
We have had wealthy presidents before, and millionaire Cabinet officials, but President-elect Donald Trump and his nominees shatter all records when it comes to the amount and scope of wealth and investments, and to potential conflicts as well.
Most presidents have been fairly wealthy, but their wealth was primarily domestic, and each in recent history has managed his conflicts through creating genuine blind trusts…
Ethics scholars across the political spectrum are calling upon the president-elect to address his conflicts of interest. Dozens of representatives from the ethics community sent Trump a letter asking that he divest himself from financial conflicts, especially from foreign investments, and move his wealth into a genuine blind trust run by an independent executor, not by the Trump family.
Huffington Post: This GOP-Backed Law Forbids Donald Trump From Using Presidency For Personal Profit
By Christina Wilkie and Paul Blumenthal
“In theory, I can be president of the United States and run my business 100 percent,” Trump bragged to The New York Times in November.
But a 2012 law called the STOCK Act could throw a wrench in Trump’s plan. A section of that law states that “no executive branch employee may use nonpublic information derived from [or acquired through] their position as an executive branch employee as a means for making a private profit.”
“The STOCK Act bars the President from: using nonpublic information for private profit,” the independent Office of Government Ethics, which handles executive branch ethics issues, wrote in a Monday letter to Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.)…
The bottom line is that if Trump were to use nonpublic information – the kind that, as president, he would likely receive every few minutes – to inform a decision he makes regarding one of his companies, he could find himself in violation of the STOCK Act, even if he wasn’t trading stocks.
The States
New York Gotham Gazette: City Council Rushes Through Campaign Finance Bills
By Ben Max
The City Council is rushing through a package of bills to reform the city’s campaign finance system. About a dozen bills driven by Council members’ frustrations with the Campaign Finance Board and its rigorous reporting system are being moved through the Council at an almost unseen pace, raising eyebrows…
Many of the bills make technical changes to the workings of the city’s public-matching campaign finance system, which is seen as a national model for limiting big money in politics. These include items related to documenting campaign contributions and the Campaign Finance Board’s review of filings by candidates. One bill allows elected officials to use their campaign funds to pay for a wider range of governmental activity, such as supplying food at a public meeting…
There are also more attention-grabbing measures, like the elimination of public matching funds for money bundled by individuals with city business. There are currently strict limits, just $400 to a campaign, on those with city business who want to donate to a candidate.
San Gabriel Valley Tribune: Lawsuit alleges Baldwin Park code prohibiting political signs violates free speech
By Stephanie K. Baer
After being fined for displaying a banner criticizing a Baldwin Park councilman on the side of his business, a local business owner sued the city on Monday alleging its sign regulations are unconstitutional.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court Central District of California, alleges the city’s zoning code “impermissibly restricts a sweeping amount of core political speech on private property,” according to court documents. City code requires permits be obtained in order to display signs in the city. Political signs are exempt from the permit requirement but only 45 days prior to an election and within 14 days after the election.
“Defendant City seeks to evade the free speech protections afforded by the First Amendment by imposing an unlawful prior restraint on expressive activity in the City,” the complaint reads. “It favors election related speech, to the extent it complies with stringent durational time limitations, over non-election related political speech.”
Madison Capital Times: Report: PAC spending on Wisconsin legislative races soars in wake of campaign finance change
By Katelyn Ferral
Political action committees more than doubled their spending on Wisconsin Legislative races this year, according to a report from the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign…
“It’s bad enough that Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-dominated Legislature doubled the amount of money that PACs could give,” Matt Rothschild, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, said in a statement. “But what’s even worse is that they snuck a clause into the new law that now allows big national special interest PACs to play by different rules in Wisconsin and to hide their influence-peddling.”
Rick Esenberg, president of the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, doesn’t see the problem…
“You can see that they were able to figure out who was supporting whom so it’s not that clear that drawing the line where it is results in some significant deficit in information. Nor am I sure that it is why PAC spending increased,” Esenberg said. “It’s not clear that this was the reason why or that PAC contributions are a bad thing or that there are matters that we don’t know about.”
In These Times: Maine Leads the Nation in Campaign Finance Reform
By Theo Anderson
In 1996, Maine voters approved a clean elections initiative that provided for public financing of legislative and gubernatorial campaigns. In 2011, courts struck down a provision of the program that gave candidates who took part matching funds from the state-that is, funds to match the amount of private money raised by their opponents. Without that provision, the candidates who took part in the program were vulnerable to being swamped by outside spending. Participation declined, from a high of 81 percent of candidates in 2008 to 53 percent in the 2014 election cycle.
Last year, voters passed a referendum to address the problem. The program now works like this: Candidates who opt in to the clean elections program must prove their viability by raising $5 donations from a certain number of one-time donors. After this qualifying round, certain benchmarks trigger more funding. Each time the candidate passes a benchmark, they receive a new round of funds.
The reformed program was in effect in November and seems to have revitalized clean elections in Maine, with 62 percent of candidates for the state legislature taking part.
