In the News
Philanthropy Daily: Senate Finance Committee subcommittee to hold hearing on tax-exempt nonprofits and politics
By Michael E. Hartmann
The U.S. Senate Committee on Finance’s Subcommittee on Taxation and IRS Oversight has announced that it has scheduled a hearing on Wednesday, May 4, at 2 p.m. Eastern time to examine “Laws and Enforcement Governing the Political Activities of Tax Exempt Entities.”
The subcommittee is chaired by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, and its ranking member is Sen. John Thune, Republican of South Dakota.
The hearing’s scheduled witnesses are: University of California, Berkeley law professor and former Federal Election Commission (FEC) chair Ann Ravel; University of Pittsburgh law professor and former Internal Revenue Service attorney Philip Hackney, who has called for eliminating tax-exempt status for private foundations; Capital University law professor and former FEC chair Brad Smith, founder of the Institute for Free Speech and a Bradley Prize recipient; and Capital Research Center president Scott Walter.
First Amendment News hosted by FIRE: SCOTUS declines to invalidate billboard law — Larry Tribe: ‘SCOTUS made a mess of 1st Amendment law’ — FAN 337
By Ronald K.L. Collins
Many thought that City of Austin, Texas v. Reagan National Advertising of Austin could be the big First Amendment case of the term, what with its potential to expand the content-based doctrine as applied in Reed v. Town of Gilbert (2015) and maybe even further broaden commercial speech rights in the process.
Among others, amicus briefs in support of the respondents were filed by the Cato Institute (Eugene Volokh, counsel of record), Alliance Defending Freedom, Institute for Free Speech, and the Pacific Legal Foundation. Though some of those briefs were relied upon by Justice Clarence Thomas, he wrote in dissent.
That said, Professor Laurence Tribe agreed with the spirit of the Thomas dissent as evidenced by a tweet he released commenting on the case: “SCOTUS made a total mess of 1st Am law. Only the 3 dissenters, pointing to the agreement of scholars as far apart as Michael McConnell and me on the key legal point, came close to offering coherent guidance.”
Thomson Reuters: Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, and Others Urge Supreme Court to Review SEC Gag Policy
By Bill Flook
Billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Cuban, free-market think tanks, constitutional scholars, and others on April 22, 2022, urged the Supreme Court to take up a petition challenging a nearly two-decade-old SEC gag order against a former Xerox Corp. executive. The cluster of amicus filings casts the commission’s long-standing policy as a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment protections, among other criticisms.
Romeril petitioned the Supreme Court in March, criticizing the SEC’s policy, rooted in its “Gag Rule,” as a “sweeping restriction on freedom of speech” implemented without Congressional authorization…
Also filing separate amicus briefs supporting the petition were a group of constitutional law and first amendment scholars; the Pelican Institute for Public Policy; the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Institute for Free Speech, and Institute for Justice; the Due Process Institute; the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute; and the Thomas More Society.
The Courts
Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Federal judge curtails law that gave Kemp fundraising advantage over Abrams
By James Salzer
A federal judge on Thursday ordered a special committee to suspend raising campaign money for Gov. Brian Kemp’s reelection bid until the GOP gubernatorial nomination is decided, temporarily eliminating what had been a major advantage Republican lawmakers carved out for him.
Judge Mark Cohen ruled that Kemp’s leadership committee — Georgians First — can’t raise any more money unless he becomes the party’s nominee. He faces former U.S. Sen. David Perdue in the GOP primary.
By then, his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, will be her party’s nominee and be eligible to use the same leadership committee law to raise unlimited funds from donors.
Congress
The Hill: Greene offers bill to abolish Section 230
By Emily Brooks
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Thursday is introducing a bill to abolish Section 230…
Greene’s bill would eliminate the law making online platforms not liable for content posted by third parties and replace it with a provision to require “reasonable, non-discriminatory access to online communications platforms” through a “common carrier” framework that Greene compared to airlines or package delivery services…
Titled the 21st Century FREE Speech Act, Greene’s measure will serve as the House version of a Senate bill sponsored by Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.).
The Federalist: Democrats Have Been Making Open War On Free Speech Since The Obama Era
By Jordan Boyd
Under Udall’s amendment, every American’s right to free speech was threatened. As Texas Sen. Ted Cruz noted in his 2014 analysis of the amendment, Democrats’ coordinated assault on free speech would grant Congress unchecked “power to silence citizens.”
The amendment eventually failed but every single Senate Democrat present that day, 54 total, voted for it. As a whole, the Democrat Party saw no problems with trying to cancel the Constitution to better serve their power.
Sound familiar? Just last year, Democrats tried to pass their federal election takeover bill HR 1, which contained provisions that “would also control what Americans and politicians say.” HR1 also failed but Democrats are still doing everything in their power to control the narrative.
Free Expression
The Atlantic: The Real Reason Cancel Culture Is So Contentious
By Conor Friedersdorf
The majority of Americans who insist that “cancel culture” is a problem and the minority who counter that it is a fraud, a myth, or a moral panic are too often talking past one another.
One faction invokes the term cancel culture as shorthand for a range of complaints…
Another faction dismisses complaints about cancel culture and reframes the status quo as “accountability culture.” …
Using any one term to frame such varied controversies hides the actual lines of disagreement…
When any faction with power fails to clarify which statements and behaviors it would punish (as opposed to merely criticize) if given the chance, its members might like the fact that they are chilling the speech of their culture-war antagonists. A dearth of clarity is hugely useful for wielding social control. It leaves everyone guessing. But a self-governing people shouldn’t have to guess at what speech is forbidden and what’s allowed.
Online Speech Platforms
Washington Post: How Musk could burst Obama’s ‘disinformation’ bubble
By Jason Willick
What if everything you know about “disinformation” is wrong? We could soon find out. The once-obscure concept surged to prominence after the 2016 election as analysts tried to explain right-wing and populist movements in Western democracies. But with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and accompanying free-speech pledge, the disinformation bubble may be bursting.
The idea that unsupervised media consumption leads voters to mass political delusion isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of democracy. Yet the “disinformation” theory of the United States’ political woes steadily gained purchase in Silicon Valley, where powerful Internet companies have taken an increasingly active role in scrubbing or suppressing certain speech deemed (often accurately, sometimes not) to be false or misleading. The Department of Homeland Security now even uses the acronym “MDM” — mis- dis- and mal-information — to describe a “terrorism threat to the U.S. homeland.”
The States
Tennesseean: Campaign finance reform bill passes after McNally issues rebuke of dark-money groups
By Adam Friedman
After a last-day negotiation, lawmakers passed a campaign finance and ethics reform bill to provide a spotlight on dark-money groups.
The bill, HB 1201, requires 501(c)4s, often considered dark-money organizations, to disclose any expenses over $5,000 in the 60 days leading up to an election when using candidate names and images…
The bill’s final version, negotiated between the House and Senate Thursday, would enhance several disclosure laws around campaign service companies and make various changes to increase transparency with the Tennessee Registry of Election Finance…
The bill passed the house with a 85-3 vote, and in the Senate 31-1.
Techdirt: Some Good News: Kentucky Passes A Good Anti-SLAPP Law
By Mike Masnick
Hey, finally time for a little bit of good news in the world of free speech: the Kentucky General Assembly recently passed the Kentucky Uniform Public Expression Protection Act. It’s a kind of anti-SLAPP bill that is based on a model bill, the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act (UPEPA), and similar to a bill passed in Washington State already, and very similar to bills proposed in a few other states as well. On Wednesday, Kentucky’s governor, Andy Beshear, signed the bill into law.
That adds one more state to the growing list of states that now have significant anti-SLAPP protections in place to help stop frivolous lawsuits designed to intimidate and silence people in response to their expression.
One of the drafters of the UPEPA, Jay Adkisson, has said that the modifications in the Kentucky version are a mixed bag, but mostly good. For instance, it clarifies that consumer opinions and reviews can be protected under this law (even though it seems that those should obviously be covered by the standard UPEPA).
