Free Speech
Capital Research Center: Featured Video: Free Speech Means Everyone Gets It
If you care about free and fair elections, then all the voices that an election can affect need to be allowed to speak. Even the wealthiest company can’t spend enough money to have as much influence as the New York Times, with its massive readership, does every day.
The Courts
Courthouse News Service: Judge Nixes Candidate-Naming Bar on Super PACs
By Britain Eakin
A federal judge found it unconstitutional Thursday to bar super PACs from touting the names of individual candidates.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan found that the regulation by the Federal Election Commission “is not narrowly tailored to promote a compelling governmental interest.”
Pursuing America’s Greatness, a super PAC that supported Mike Huckabee’s 2016 presidential bid, brought the lawsuit back in July 2015 after the FEC applied the regulation to its social media pages and websites.
Though Chutkan refused to give the challenger an injunction in 2015, the D.C. Circuit reversed that decision a year later, finding that the regulation constituted a ban on content-based speech and remanded the case.
The D.C. Circuit also held that the regulation was likely “not the least restrictive means to achieve the government’s interest.”
On remand, the agency failed to sway Chutkan that there were problems with the additional disclosure requirements proposed by the super PAC.
The super PAC said it could inform visitors that they had not reached an official candidate website, but the FEC said any disclaimers would need to be large and thus burdensome. Were the disclaimers too small, one commissioner warned that the super PAC could effectively bury it.
The FEC also argued that the demand would be seen as an unfair regulation.
Chutkan denied each in turn.
“These observations are anecdotal, not based on empirical evidence, and simply speculate about potential problems rather than analyze whether the proposed procedures would be feasible and/or effective,” the 17-page opinion says. “Moreover, a concern that some political parties or candidates might object to disclosures does not constitute evidence that those disclosures would be ineffective.”
DOJ
New York Times: Trump’s Shamelessness Was Outside Mueller’s Jurisdiction
By Bob Bauer
[T]he Mueller report marked a low point for more substantive norms of presidential conduct. It shows that a demagogic president like Donald Trump can devalue or even depart radically from key norms, just short of committing chargeable crimes, so long as he operates mostly and brazenly in full public view. For a demagogue, shamelessness is its own reward.
Such a president can have openly, actively encouraged and welcomed foreign government support for his political campaigns, and his campaign can reinforce the point in direct communications with that government’s representatives. The Barr summary reveals that the special counsel uncovered not just a couple but “multiple offers” of support from the Russians, and yet neither Mr. Trump nor his campaign reported them to counterintelligence or law enforcement authorities. Mr. Trump went further still – while in office, he dictated a statement for his son and campaign aide, Donald Trump Jr., that falsely represented the purposes of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between senior campaign representatives and a Kremlin-connected representative (and others) offering assistance in the 2016 election.
Mr. Mueller proceeded cautiously on this and other evidence. Federal campaign finance laws prohibit soliciting and receiving support from foreign nationals or “substantially assisting” them in their efforts to influence an American election, but Mr. Mueller concluded that the rules as applied to the facts did not support a criminal prosecution. This was a conservative judgment – but it underscores again the urgent work norms must do if the law is inadequate to the task.
Wall Street Journal: Mueller Report Clears President Trump-but Not President Putin
By Gerald F. Seib
The more subtle problem is that the obsession with Mr. Trump and his personal fate is deflecting attention from the crime Mr. Mueller did find, and apparently beyond reasonable doubt: that Russia tried, on two separate fronts, to interfere with the U.S. electoral process in 2016. This amounts to a kind of attack on the U.S. by a sovereign state and is no small thing.
First, the Barr summary says, Russia engaged in a disinformation and social-media campaign “to sow social discord, eventually with the aim of interfering with the election.” That sentence bears close reading: Russia set out to create divisions within America and then later decided to actually try to steer the election’s outcome.
Second, Russia hacked into the computers of Democratic organizations and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and disseminated the stolen emails.
These two conclusions have been widely assumed, but Mr. Mueller is giving them a nonpartisan stamp of confirmation.
Slate: Mueller’s Unknown Reasoning Could Endanger American Democracy in 2020
By Richard L. Hasen
At the top of my list of unanswered questions is why Mueller declined to prosecute former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort or Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. for violating laws prohibiting the solicitation of foreign contributions to American campaigns, based on those campaign surrogates’ June 2016 meeting with Russian agents at Trump Tower…
Despite this seemingly strong case, Mueller never indicted Trump Jr. or anyone else for federal campaign finance violations, which seem much more serious than the unrelated “hush money” campaign finance violations to which former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty and which have implicated the president…
To let someone off the hook who solicited “very high level and sensitive information” from a hostile government-on grounds that there may be cases in which information from a foreign source does not pose the same level of danger to our national security and right of self-government-would turn the First Amendment into a tool to kill American sovereignty and democracy.
If this is what Mueller concluded, we need to know, because it means that Department of Justice officials will not see the need to stop foreign governments from sharing information-even information obtained from illegal hacking-with campaigns, for the purposes of influencing the 2020 elections. And if Mueller based this conclusion on his reading of the Constitution, even new congressional legislation could not stop it, and that seems dangerous.
Now it could be that Mueller had other, less troublesome reasons for not charging Trump Jr. with solicitation. Maybe he thought “I love it” was not clear enough. Maybe he construed federal campaign finance laws so that Russian information did not count as a “thing of value.” Maybe he was just exercising his prosecutorial discretion over political amateurs like Trump Jr., though that would not apply to campaign veteran Paul Manafort.
The Media
New York Times: The Paranoid Center
By Ross Douthat
I’m borrowing the parallel to the Iraq debate from Matt Taibbi, the left-wing muckraker and flamethrower, whose splenetic denunciation this weekend of the media’s Russia coverage declared that as “a purely journalistic failure … W.M.D. was a pimple compared to Russiagate.”
Like many of Taibbi’s claims over the years, this one seems overdrawn. Yes, the most extreme forms of the collusion narrative were always exceedingly unlikely, but the combination of a real Russian crime and a lot of lying and guilty-seeming behavior by Trump and his hangers-on made a certain amount of speculation inevitable and reasonable. Yes, the mainstream press gave too much credence to the Steele dossier and rushed to publish too quickly on seemingly incriminating stories. But as long as you got news from somewhere other than Rachel Maddow the case for skepticism was amply available as well…
[I]n both cases the strongest skepticism came not just from partisans (Trump-defending Republicans with Russia, Bush-hating Democrats with Iraq) but also from the ideological fringes, both further left and further right. The Iraq war was fiercely opposed by paleoconservatives and antiwar libertarians as well as by the antiwar left, and the strongest skeptics of the Russiagate narrative have been left-wing journalists – Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Michael Tracey and others.
This pattern points to the essential difference between paranoias of the fringes and what Reason’s Jesse Walker once called “the paranoid center.” …
[O]ne might hope, in this specific case, that having an establishment figure like Robert Mueller rendering a skeptical verdict will suffice to put the more baroque Trump-Russia conspiracies to rest … or at least to banish them from cable and newsprint, and back to the extremely long Twitter threads where they first flourished, and ultimately belong.
Congress
Medium: A message to New Mexico from Tom:
By Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.)
[T]he worst thing anyone in public office can do is believe the office belongs to them, rather than to the people they represent. That’s why I’m announcing today that I won’t be seeking re-election next year.
Now, I’m most certainly not retiring. I intend to find new ways to serve New Mexico and our country after I finish this term. There will be more chapters in my public service to do what needs to be done…
I’ll continue leading the fight against the special interests, to pass the For the People Act to strengthen voting rights, end Citizens United and eliminate dark money in political campaigns.
Fundraising
Politico: Looming 2020 deadline triggers wild chase for cash
By Christopher Cadelago
Democratic presidential candidates are on a white-knuckle ride to March 31, the quarterly reporting deadline that will signal who’s rolling in cash and who’s scraping just to establish viability.
All too conscious that the numbers they report will be viewed as either a show of strength or the first sign of weakness, the campaigns are furiously chasing dollars to bulk up their totals, while quietly managing expectations behind the scenes with staffers, supporters and the media…
The Federal Election Commission deadline looms especially large this year. In a crowded field in which it’s difficult to draw sharp distinctions between candidates, the first campaign finance report of the election cycle promises the first quantifiable measure to assess how the nascent campaigns are faring…
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is pumping out email after email to supporters, designed to squeeze out every last dollar. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) has stepped up her fundraising, scheduling a flurry of fundraisers in her home state of California, as well as stops in Washington, Florida and New York. Joe Biden is thought to be delaying a possible launch until after the deadline, so he doesn’t have to report a weak fundraising figure.
In preparation for the first filing period, virtually every 2020 presidential candidate saw a boost in Facebook spending last week. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who spent the most on the platform last week, spent nearly double what she had spent for the rest of 2019 combined…
Officials with rival campaigns acknowledge that they have little hope of competing with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), the field’s fundraising pacesetters at the moment…
“We have two really big online behemoths,” one Democratic campaign aide said, and “then we have the rest.”
The States
Mississippi Center for Public Policy: Voters Support Donor Privacy Bill On Governor’s Desk
By Brett Kittredge
Authored by Rep. Jerry Turner and championed by Rep. Mark Baker, HB 1205 allows a nonprofit organization to defend itself in court if a rogue government agency or employee releases the nonprofit’s confidential donor lists.
“The enemies of free speech and free association are making our political environment toxic by seeking to silence and intimidate anyone who disagrees with them,” said Dr. Jameson Taylor, vice president for policy with MCPP. “In Montana, the governor is going after businesses who donate to trade associations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In California, then-AG Kamala Harris made it a priority to obtain the donor lists of conservative groups like Americans for Prosperity. At the federal level, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat-majority House have passed H.R. 1, which would destroy donor privacy and politicize the federal contracting process.
“Unfortunately, these tactics are not new. They were used by government officials in the 1950s in an effort to destroy the NAACP. They are being used today to bully and harass donors who give to nonprofit organizations.”
Statewide polling shows 81 percent of Mississippi voters support legislation that would protect the personal information of individuals who donate to the causes and charities of their choice. HB 1205 would do that by making it a crime for the government to release the personal information of any person who gives to an entity organized under Section 501(c) of the Internal Revenue Code…
“The people of Mississippi support donor privacy because we realize, perhaps more than most, how necessary it is to protect the right of everyone, regardless of race, creed or political affiliation, to support the causes they individually believe in without fear of discrimination and retaliation,” said Dr. Taylor.
Oregon Public Broadcasting: Oregon Campaign Finance Reformers Focus On ‘Dark Money’
By Jeff Mapes
“You can’t stop dark money under Citizens United,” said Portland attorney Jason Kafoury, who has led successful efforts to limit campaign spending in Multnomah County and the city of Portland. “The only thing you can do is disclose who’s giving them money and shame them into not doing it.”
Gov. Brown and legislative leaders are currently moving toward sending a proposed constitutional amendment to voters that would explicitly allow such caps. At the same time, many lawmakers and campaign finance watchdog groups want to couple the limits with some type of program to provide public funding to campaigns. They say that gives them a way to raise money to get their message out without relying on special interests.
They also want to find a way to reduce – or at least expose – the role of dark-money groups and other independent campaigns…
Hetfeld, a former Salem lobbyist for several business interests, said her group’s donors have legitimate reasons for staying secret.
“Government officials, who if they disagree with what you’re saying to the public, can use the tools of state government to harass you, bully you, try to put you out of business,” she said…
Rayfield, the Corvallis legislator, has introduced two measures aimed at requiring nonprofits to publicly report their large donors in certain cases. Under House Bill 2709, that would occur if the group places advertisements that “could only be interpreted by a reasonable person” as advocating the defeat or election of a candidate…
Rayfield said he is still trying to figure out where to set the threshold in his bill for requiring donor transparency. Currently, his other measure, House Bill 2983, requires disclosures of those giving at least $50,000 for ads involving legislative candidates and $250,000 for statewide races.
Post Register (Idaho Falls): Campaign finance overhaul passes House
By Nathan Brown
A major overhaul of Idaho’s campaign finance reporting law passed the Idaho House 52-15 on Monday.
It passed the Senate in late February and will now head back to that body. The House amended Senate Bill 1113 to raise the threshold at which political committees have to report spending or contributions from $500 to $1,000. The House also changed it to say that if a candidate is late in filing a report, the $50-per-day fine wouldn’t kick until after 48 hours have passed.
The bill, which was crafted by an interim legislative committee, would require candidates to file reports more often, every month on the 10th day of each month for the four months before a primary or general election. It would require candidates for local offices to report contributions or spending once they have raised or spent more than $500. And it would create a central, online database, maintained by the Idaho Secretary of State, for reporting all campaign contributions and expenditures from every level of government. It wouldn’t make any changes to the reporting thresholds for statewide or legislative candidates.
The new rules will take effect on Jan. 1, 2020, a general election year when city offices wouldn’t be up for election. Floor sponsor Rep. Fred Wood, R-Burley, said this would give local candidates time to learn about the new reporting requirements…
A second campaign finance reform bill that emerged from the committee’s work that would have expanded electioneering communication requirements. That bill stalled in the Senate amid concerns about donor privacy from lobbying groups, and Wood said he doesn’t expect it to go anywhere this session.
