We’re Hiring!
Senior Attorney – Institute for Free Speech – Washington, DC or Virtual Office
The Institute for Free Speech is hiring a Senior Attorney with a minimum of seven years of experience.
This is a rare opportunity to work with a growing team to litigate a long-term legal strategy directed toward the protection of Constitutional rights. We challenge laws, practices, and policies that infringe upon First Amendment freedoms, such as speech codes that censor parents at school board meetings, laws restricting people’s ability to give and receive campaign contributions, and any intrusion into people’s private political associations. You would work to hold censors accountable; and to secure legal precedents clearing away a thicket of laws, regulations, and practices that suppress speech about government and candidates for political office, threaten citizens’ privacy if they speak or join groups, and impose heavy burdens on political activity.
[You can learn more about this role and apply for the position here.]
Supreme Court
Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): SCOTUS Grants Cert in 303 Creative On Free Speech Question
By Josh Blackman
The Supreme Court has granted cert in 303 Creative v. Elenis. That petition presented two questions:
- Whether applying a public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent, contrary to the artist’s sincerely held religious beliefs, violates the Free Speech or Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment.
- Whether a public-accommodation law that authorizes secular but not religious exemptions is generally applicable under Smith, and if so, whether this Court should overrule Smith.
Once again, the Court narrowed the QP:
The petition for a writ of certiorari is granted limited to the following question: Whether applying a public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.
Independent Groups
Axios: Conservatives pin progressive consulting firm as new “dark money” target
By Lachlan Markay
A leading conservative advocacy group’s seven-figure effort to turn an obscure progressive consulting firm into the face of Democratic “dark money” is drawing legal threats from the firm’s lawyers, Axios has learned.
The Judicial Crisis Network’s $2.5 million ad campaign goes after Arabella Advisors in the context of President Biden’s upcoming nomination to the Supreme Court. But it’s part of a much larger effort on the right to make Arabella a household name.
Washington Post: In the federal court wars, the right has jumped through a dark-money looking glass
By Sheldon Whitehouse
Now, an anonymously funded right-wing group is airing an ad aimed at the yet-to-be-picked nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer. The group alleges that liberal dark-money interests will guide President Biden’s choice. The music is ominous, the central claim false, and the hypocrisy thick…
The real test on dark money is to support legislation to clean it up. Every single Senate Democrat has voted in favor of my bill — the Disclose Act — to end dark money in our politics and judiciary. Even the liberal groups targeted in the Judicial Crisis Network ad back this measure. But dark-money power is too important a weapon for right-wing donors to abandon, which explains why, just a few weeks ago, Senate Republicans filibustered to block that from passing.
Donor Exposure
Wall Street Journal (Potomac Watch Podcast): Canada Declares a Trucker Emergency
Hosted by Paul Gigot, Kim Strassel, Bill McGurn and Kyle Peterson
Kyle Peterson: But even in the absence of any Emergencies Act invocation here, the leak of that material is clearly damaging to people. There have been protestors who made threats, I believe, at people who had donated … a cafe owner in Ottawa. We’ve had similar conversations in the United States here. There was a recent Supreme Court case on this, where California had demanded that as a matter of course, nonprofits give the state of California a list of their donors. And it said it needed that to police fraud and so forth. And California did not have a great record of protecting that information, and the state lost in the Supreme Court. And so Elliot, there’s interesting parallels here to a similar debate about how private should donors to nonprofit groups and so forth, how private should that information be? And the importance of that if we’re not going to chill speech?
Elliot Kaufman: I think that’s exactly right. I mean, donor transparency sounds wonderful, and dark money sounds awful. But what these laws like the one in California end up looking like, we can see in Canada. Targeted harassment campaigns, both by the Twitter mob, which becomes an actual mob when they start calling in threats of violence to an Ottawa gelato cafe, as you referenced. Forcing it to close, forcing donors to recant to media. But it’s not only Twitter mob, it’s not only anonymous threats, it’s then calls for public boycotts, calls for firings. Those are all happening in Canada, right now.
PACs
Newsweek: Walgreens Slammed on Twitter for Alleged Donations to ‘Sedition Caucus’
By Fatma Khaled
Walgreens has been criticized on Twitter for allegedly making donations in November to GOP lawmakers who rejected the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential win.
The hashtag #BoycottWalgreens has been trending on Twitter since Thursday as some users expressed their frustration about Walgreens making contributions worth a total of $25,500 to 11 members of Congress.
The allegations were published on Friday in a report released by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), citing disclosures by the Federal Election Commission.
International
New York Times: An Old Problem Suddenly Dominates Australia’s Election: ‘Dark Money’
By Damien Cave
When Dr. Ken Coghill served in the Victoria state legislature in the early 1980s, he joined a movement to reform Australia’s campaign finance system, which allowed donations to slosh through politics, with donors mostly able to hide their identities and contributions…
Nearly 40 years later, Dr. Coghill is still outraged, because little has changed. But now, that culture of cashed-up secrecy is suddenly defining the start of the federal election campaign that will determine whether the current conservative prime minister remains in power.
Online Speech Platforms
CNET: Trump App Truth Social Reportedly Bans Account for Mocking Devin Nunes
By Mary King
Former US President Donald Trump’s recently launched app Truth Social has reportedly banned a user for trying to make an account called @DevinNunesCow, despite Trump positioning the social network as a bulwark against censorship.
