In the News
New York Times: Right to Free Speech? On the City Council, It Has Limits
By Jeffery C. Mays
The remarks, by Rubén Díaz Sr. of the Bronx and Kalman Yeger of Brooklyn, brought immediate condemnation from their colleagues and led to what the City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, said was a “loss of confidence” in both men…
“You have a right to free speech,” Mr. Johnson said in an interview. “But you don’t have a right to a committee on the City Council.”
David Keating, president of the Institute for Free Speech, a nonprofit that defends First Amendment rights and political speech, said … the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that public employees and legislators have the same rights to free speech as private citizens.
“These people are being punished for their speech,” Mr. Keating said, referring to Mr. Yeger and Mr. Díaz. “If you don’t agree with something, the remedy is to speak out about your views.”
In 1966, the Georgia House of Representatives voted not to seat the civil rights activist Julian Bond, who had just been elected, because he spoke against the Vietnam War. A lower court upheld the move, but the Supreme Court reversed the decision, ruling that officials in a “representative government” should be given “the widest latitude to express their views on issues of policy.” …
Eliminating Mr. Díaz’s Committee on For-Hire Vehicles and removing Mr. Yeger from the Committee on Immigration is akin to the government taking action to curtail speech, Mr. Keating suggested.
“There is a potential chill on free speech. Maybe one of the other 49 Council members will say: ‘I should keep my mouth shut if what I have to say is not popular,'” he said…
Even while defending their right to make the remarks they made, Mr. Keating said the councilmen’s comments could be problematic. “The reality is when you make comments like this, it makes you less effective as a legislator,” he said.
KELO AM-FM: South Dakota’s IM-24 challenged in court
By Mark Russo
Major business and media groups in South Dakota have jointly filed a federal suit against IM-24, approved by the voters last November.
IM-24 bans the use of out-of-state money to fund ballot question campaigns.
State Broadcasters Association President Steve Willard says limiting free speech by location may sound good, but its an awful idea. Other parties to the suit include the SD Newspaper Association, the SD Retailers Association, and the SD Chamber of Commerce.
Their in-state attorney is former State Attorney General Marty Jackley.
[Learn more about the case here.]
FEC
Center for Public Integrity: Third Time’s A Charm? Federal Election Commission Will Try – Again – To Find An Internal Watchdog
By Dave Levinthal
Without explanation, the FEC last week for the third time posted a new hiring announcement for its agency inspector general position – vacant more than two years. The inspector general’s office itself has been largely nonfunctional since November, when the lone deputy inspector general resigned…
Update, 8:31 a.m. April 23: The FEC has published a notice on the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency’s website seeking an acting inspector general for a “120-day detail beginning May 13, 2019.” The detail could be extended an “additional 90 to 120 days upon mutual agreement … until the recruitment and appointment of a new, permanent Inspector General is completed.” The notice also states that the acting inspector general, who must be a current federal employee, would have the “same authorities as a permanent IG.” …
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Committee on House Administration, this month sent FEC commissioners a letter, with 46 questions, inquiring about the agency’s operations, including the inspector general and general counsel offices.
Lofgren, who says she plans to this year conduct the first U.S. House oversight hearing on the FEC since 2011, gave the FEC until May 1 to respond.
Independent Groups
Daily Beast: How One Dem Super PAC Uses Facebook Ads to Get Critical Voter Data to its Candidate
By Lachlan Markay, Sam Stein, Kevin Poulsen
The tactic has drawn the attention of Democratic digital strategists and raised eyebrows among ethics watchdogs. But the campaign hasn’t asked for the help and says it isn’t mining the data.
“The Inslee campaign is growing grassroots momentum behind the only candidate who will put climate change first,” said Jared Leopold, a spokesman for Inslee. “We are not monitoring messaging data from outside groups.”
The apparent key to the scheme is Act Now On Climate’s Facebook page, which it’s used to run hundreds of pro-Inslee ads since March. The vast majority of those ads-all but two of them-link directly to the Inslee campaign’s official website, and urge visitors to sign petitions or register their names and email addresses with the campaign.
It’s rare for a super PAC to so directly promote the work product of the campaign itself. But ANOC’s strategy appears to be geared not only towards advertising Inslee himself but also collecting valuable data that can be used by his campaign-all without ever communicating with the candidate or his staff.
Each of the ANOC ads that link to Inslee’s campaign website uses a unique ID number affixed to the end of the web address…
Administrators of any website can easily see the exact links that visitors clicked to get to that website. So Inslee’s digital staff can tally up visits from a specific “subsource” number. Using Facebook’s public database of political ads, it can then see which ANOC ad used that unique identifier, and it can see the the ages, genders, and locations of the people who viewed the ad, giving the campaign plenty of demographic information about who clicked on a particular super PAC ad.
DOJ
New York Times: Mueller Report Likely to Renew Scrutiny of Steele Dossier
By Scott Shane, Adam Goldman and Matthew Rosenberg
Now the dossier – financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and compiled by the former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele – is likely to face new, possibly harsh scrutiny from multiple inquiries.
Republicans in Congress have vowed to investigate. The Justice Department’s inspector general is considering whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation improperly relied on the dossier in applying to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a warrant to eavesdrop on Carter Page, a Trump adviser. The inspector general wants to know what the F.B.I. learned about Mr. Steele’s sources and whether it disclosed any doubts about their veracity to the court.
And Attorney General William Barr has said he will review the F.B.I.’s conduct in the Russia investigation. His remark that there was “spying” on the Trump campaign has already encouraged Republican accusations of misconduct.
Wall Street Journal: Mueller’s Report Speaks Volumes
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Up to now, the assumption was that Mr. Mueller had resurrected long-ago violations of the rarely enforced Foreign Agent Registration Act of 1938 purely to apply pressure on folks like Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn. Now we find out that it was resurrected in hopes of applying it to campaign-period actions of minor figures such as Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.
Mueller’s team even considered charging Trump associates who participated with campaign-finance violations for the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. Was that meeting “a conspiracy to violate the foreign contributions ban”? Was it “the solicitation of an illegal foreign source contribution”? Was it the receipt of “an express or implied promise to make a [foreign source] contribution”? The team considered that the law didn’t apply only to money-it could apply to a “thing of value.” Until investigators realized it might be hard to prove the “promised documents” exceeded the “$2,000 threshold for a criminal violation.” …
Note as well what isn’t in the report. It makes only passing, bland references to the genesis of so many of the accusations Mr. Mueller probed: the infamous dossier produced by opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. How do you exonerate Mr. Page without delving into the scandalous Moscow deeds of which he was falsely accused? How do you narrate an entire section on the July 2016 Trump Tower meeting without noting that Ms. Veselnitskaya was working alongside Fusion? How do you detail every aspect of the Papadopoulos accusations while avoiding any detail of the curious and suspect ways that those accusations came back to the FBI via Australia’s Alexander Downer?
The report instead mostly reads as a lengthy defense of the FBI-of its shaky claims about how its investigation began, of its far-fetched theories, of its procedures, even of its leadership.
Candidates and Campaigns
The Public’s Radio Rhode Island: Whitehouse Blames ‘Dark Money’ For Why He Raised So Much For ’18 Campaign
By Ian Donnis
Whitehouse enjoyed a lopsided victory, with more than 61 percent of the vote…
Since his last election back in 2012, Whitehouse had raised more than $6 million…
The Republican raised a little more than $1 million, an amount dwarfed by Whitehouse’s campaign account…
Congressional incumbents generally win re-election more than 90 percent of the time, and Whitehouse is unapologetic about his aggressive fundraising. Whitehouse says spending more than $5 million on his re-election was part of what it took to show Rhode Islanders that he wanted their votes.
“And even if you had no opponent, they would want to see a big effort,” he said. “They’d want to see you talking to them on television, they’d want to see your mail in their mail slots, they’d want to see you out there hustling.” …
“What’s extraordinary about Sheldon Whitehouse is that he spent that much money in a very small state,” [Brown University political science professor Wendy] Schiller said. “So it was either overly cautionary on his part, or he was scared of something in that race, because the number is large for the size of the state and the fact that it was his second re-election campaign.”
The thing that concerned Whitehouse was a potential attack fueled by millions of dollars in dark money from powerful hidden interests…
“If there’s a person in the Senate who the fossil fuel industry and the big dark money crowd is more annoyed with than me, I don’t know who that person is,” Whitehouse said. “So I viewed myself as being very high up that target list.” …
Because of this, Whitehouse said, he needed a big pile of campaign money as a form of self-defense…
But as it turned out, dark money interests did not come after Whitehouse last year.
The States
Colorado Springs Gazette: Campaign finance and election law require bipartisan approach
By Wayne Williams
As Colorado’s Secretary of State, I took great pride in the overarching mission for this important office: to conduct the responsibilities of the office objectively and fairly for the sake of the Colorado voters and businesses I had the honor of representing…
I’m concerned that two bills recently introduced in the state legislature at the behest of our current Secretary of State do not reflect this mission. Senate Bill 232 and House Bill 1318 are partisan proposals purporting to promote campaign finance and election law reform but fall short of the mark.
SB232 expands the Secretary of State’s campaign finance enforcement authority in a way that could lead to politicizing the office unnecessarily, which I don’t believe is the intent but could be the unintended result.
While HB1318 has the noble mission of increased transparency, it could expose donors who choose to exercise their First Amendment rights anonymously, and it prohibits immigrants from being involved in political speech during an election.
These bills do not enjoy bipartisan support and were drafted without the open, stakeholder process that Coloradans expect from their elected officials. The best course of action for both bills would be to reject them and replace them with a bipartisan review process to include concerned citizens from multiple political perspectives, community groups, and others actively involved in exercising their First Amendment rights.
Measures that govern our right to political speech are of such great importance to the public good that they are worthy of measured, partisan-free discussion and debate, and possibly decided by the very voters who determine the future of the great American experiment.
New York Post: Taxpayers don’t like footing the bill for publicly funded elections: poll
By Carl Campanile
It took years for Albany to adopt public financing for elections – but voters are giving the reform a big thumbs-down when told it will cost $100 million…
The Siena College poll found that voters by a nearly 3-to-1 margin – 63 to 23% – oppose putting up that money each election to reduce the influence of big contributors by having the public pick up a lot of the tab through matching funds.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the legislature named a commission last month to come up with a public financing system by the end of year, in time for the 2020 elections.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Big-money political donors in Georgia will be able to give even more
By James Salzer
The state ethics commission – formally known as the Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission – raised the maximum campaign contribution limits by up to $1,000 for donors to most statewide candidates who make it to the general election, and up to an extra $500 in legislative contests…
The commission voted last week to raise the limit on donations in statewide races – for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, etc. – from $6,600 for a primary, $3,900 for a primary runoff and $6,600 for a general election, to $7,000 for both primary and general elections, and $4,100 for a primary runoff.
Since primary runoffs are fairly common, someone planning to run for governor would be able to raise $18,100, rather than $17,100, from a single donor.
Candidates who wind up in one of the fairly rare general election runoffs could take in an additional $4,100 per donor.
While there won’t be another governor’s race until 2022, state lawmakers will be on the ballot next year.
For their races, the change would allow lawmakers to raise $2,800 each for primary and general elections from a single donor, and $1,500 for a runoff. That would increase the total for a General Assembly candidate who has a runoff from the current $6,600 to $7,100 from a single donor…
Under state law, the commission can only lower or raise rates based on inflation. If there is little or no inflation, they can leave the limits as they are.
David Emadi, the executive secretary of the commission, said the limits the panel changed had been in place since 2016. He added that California, Ohio and Wisconsin were among the states that allowed donors to give local candidates more than in Georgia.
“Ours is much lower than a number of states,” he said.
