In the News
Palm Beach Post: Lozman faces Riviera Beach in U.S. Supreme Court for rare second time
By Jane Musgrave
On Tuesday, five years after the 56-year-old former U.S. Marine, commodities trader and self-made millionaire notched his first U.S. Supreme Court victory against the city, he will be back for round two…
Constitutional lawyer Floyd Abrams, who helped the New York Times win the right to publish The Pentagon Papers over the objections of the Nixon Administration, has thrown his considerable legal weight behind Lozman and his legal team from Stanford University Law School.
“Arrests made in retaliation for the exercise of First Amendment rights are a particularly chilling form of governmental response to constitutionally protected but officially disfavored speech,” Abrams wrote on behalf of the Virginia-based Institute for Free Speech…
Abrams and some of the others who support Lozman suggest a compromise similar to that embraced by the 9th Circuit. While police or elected officials could be allowed to argue that they had probable cause to arrest someone, that would be only one of the factors that would be considered.
“If the presence of probable cause alone defeats the existence of a First Amendment retaliatory arrest claim under all circumstances, arrests rooted in an effort to stifle protected speech will become judicially unscrutinized and undisturbed throughout the nation,” Abrams wrote.
Supreme Court
Washington Post: A Florida provocateur has his day before the U.S. Supreme Court – again
By Robert Barnes
The latest rendition of Lozman v. City of Riviera Beach has grown from a ham-handed attempt to cut him off at a city council meeting into a major free-speech showdown that will have nationwide implications for citizens arrested – as Lozman was – by government officials they criticize. The court will hear arguments in the case Tuesday…
“If I lose this case, it will be a sad day for our democracy,” Lozman said recently. “Our country will slide further into a police state. . . . It sounds hokey, but this is kind of a noble battle to fight.” …
This time at the Supreme Court, Lozman is supported by First Amendment organizations, the American Civil Liberties Union and a coalition of media organizations who say Lozman’s fight is especially important at a time when protests of government policies are on the rise and government officials are geared up to shut them down.
The city of Riviera Beach, meanwhile, is backed by the Trump administration, the District of Columbia and 10 states who say that showing there was probable cause for an arrest – as a jury found in Lozman’s case – should be the end of a retaliatory arrest claim.
Wall Street Journal: Public Unions vs. the First Amendment
By Editorial Board
The Supreme Court on Monday will hear the landmark First Amendment case Janus v. Afscme that challenges whether public employees can be compelled to subsidize union advocacy. As Thomas Jefferson once wrote, requiring “a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical”-and unconstitutional.
Janus gives the Supreme Court another crack at its flawed Abood (1977) precedent that let governments force nonunion public employees to pay “agency fees.” A 4-4 Court split in Friedrichs v. CTA (2016) after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death left Abood standing, but perhaps not for long.
Internet Speech Regulation
NBC News: Sen. Klobuchar: Fining social media for bots is a ‘great idea’
By Kailani Koenig
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said Sunday that she believes tech giants like Facebook and Twitter should face fines if they fail to get rid of “bots” after they are discovered by the government.
“I think that would be a great idea,” she said when asked on Sunday’s “Meet The Press.” “But then you need a Congress to act and there are too many people who are afraid of doing something about this because we know these sites are popular.” …
Klobuchar is behind a bill in the Senate called the “Honest Ads Act” that’s aimed at ensuring political ads sold online are subject to the same rules and restrictions as advertisements are on TV and radio…
“There’s an ugly side of this. And someone once said that these systems were set up without alarms, without locks, and big surprise, bad guys are coming in and manipulating people,” Klobuchar said. “The idea of a fine is like when a company dumps toxic waste, makes a Superfund site, they’re on the hook financially for the damage they cause.”
Independent Groups
New York Times: The True Source of the N.R.A.’s Clout: Mobilization, Not Donations
By Eric Lipton and Alexander Burns
To many of its opponents, that decades-long string of victories is proof that the N.R.A. has bought its political support. But the numbers tell a more complicated story: The organization’s political action committee over the last decade has not made a single direct contribution to any current member of the Florida House or Senate, according to campaign finance records…
“It’s really not the contributions,” said Cleta Mitchell, a former N.R.A. board member. “It’s the ability of the N.R.A. to tell its members: Here’s who’s good on the Second Amendment.”
Far more than any check the N.R.A. could write, it is this mobilization operation that has made the organization such a challenging adversary for Democrats and gun control advocates…
“Everyone wants a simplistic answer, which is they buy votes,” said Harry L. Wilson, a political scientist at Roanoke College and the author of “Guns, Gun Control, and Elections.” “But it is largely incorrect. The N.R.A.’s power is more complex than people think.” …
“Its most precious resource is perhaps the passion and political engagement of its members and its fans,” said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics…
Over all, the success rate of the N.R.A. ebbs and flows with political trends.
The Media
National Review: In Praise of the New York Times Opinion Section. No, Really.
By Kyle Smith
Expecting the Times to become a completely neutral news outlet is like expecting the Vatican Bookshop to start selling Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great. But I’ve been reading the paper for more than 30 years (grumbling for most of that time, often outright harrumphing), and I believe that the last year has marked the first time the paper has showed awareness of its confirmation bias – the bubble problem. James Bennet, the editorial-page editor brought on board in March of 2016, hired a major right-of-center columnist, Bret Stephens, from the Wall Street Journal last April 12. Two days later, he took a significant step further and hired Bari Weiss, an op-ed writer and editor, also from the Journal, with a writ to bring right-leaning thinkers to the paper. To say the least, the Times is not ordinarily in the habit of poaching talent from the leading conservative opinion section in the country. Yet since Weiss’s hire, conservative commentary has flourished in the Times like never before. These days, hardly a week goes by without a column by Naomi Schaefer Riley or Charles Kesler or John Yoo or Benjamin Domenech or Stephen Moore or Yuval Levin. These are great people, not housebroken conservatives who love to curl up in liberal laps, and they’ve all appeared in the Times since the beginning of the year.
The States
Arkansas Online: Citizens file to join Little Rock fundraising suit
By Chelsea Boozer
A group of citizens has asked to intervene in Little Rock’s lawsuit over when candidates in this year’s mayoral election can begin raising funds.
A court filing Friday said the city’s ordinance that sets a more abbreviated time frame for when city candidates can collect campaign contributions than does state law violates citizens’ First Amendment rights of political association, speech and campaign finance.
The ordinance “chills and unduly burdens the exercise of these rights,” the filing on behalf of Ellison Poe, Jim Rule, Lauren Appel and Jonathan Aronson said…
They say the Little Rock’s ordinance that bans campaign contributions and expenditures before June for a November election “presents a current and ongoing threat.”
“The City has sought to enforce the Ordinance in the circumstances of this case, and, so long as the Ordinance remains on the books, the City has the ability, in its sole discretion, to seek to enforce the Ordinance against any person or entity, including but not limited to the Poe Intervenors. The Poe Intervenors should not have to weigh the threat posed by the Ordinance while engaging in protected First Amendment activities.”
New York Times: In Spite of Executive Order, Cuomo Takes Campaign Money From State Appointees
By Shane Goldmacher, Brian M. Rosenthal, Agustin Armendariz
Things were supposed to change in 2007, when Eliot L. Spitzer, then the newly elected governor, issued an executive order barring most appointees from donating to or soliciting donations for the governor who made the appointment. Mr. Cuomo renewed the order on his first day in office.
But a New York Times investigation found that the Cuomo administration has quietly reinterpreted the directive, enabling him to collect about $890,000 from two dozen of his appointees. Some gave within days of being appointed…
In response to questions about the donations from appointees, Cuomo administration officials said they believed that the order only applied to appointees who could be fired at any time by the governor, not those serving set terms…
The Cuomo interpretation differs from what some public authorities say in their own internal ethics rules, from the interpretation of independent government watchdogs and from what Mr. Spitzer himself said he intended when he crafted the order.
“The executive order was intended, and did, in fact, apply to all gubernatorial appointees, regardless of the need for Senate confirmation, or any term applicable to their service,” Mr. Spitzer said in an interview.
