In the News
MinnPost: Campaign Finance Lawsuits In Minnesota And Other States Take Aim At Contribution Limits
By Devin Henry
“There’s nothing in the [McCutcheon] decision itself that says you can’t go after contribution limits, but it does say that these contribution limits have to have some rationale behind them,” said David Keating, the president of the Center for Competitive Politics. “I think the courts are going to apply a more skeptical eye to contribution limits generally.”
IRS
Free Beacon: IRS Revokes Tax-Exempt Status of Conservative Group
By Alana Goodman
The Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty engaged in “deliberate and consistent intervention in political campaigns,” according to the IRS decision released Friday and first reported by USA Today.
The IRS said the group’s tax-exemption would be revoked as of July 1 unless the decision is successfully appealed.
SCOTUS/Judiciary
Washington Post: Campaign speech case is regulatory overkill
By George Will
Ohio’s law, which obviously is designed to encourage self-censorship, certainly chilled the SBA List’s political speech. Yet a lower court upheld the infliction of the intentionally speech-suppressive law on the SBA List because those challenging it supposedly must prove something impossible — that if they persisted in their speech, they would be certainly, imminently and successfully prosecuted. Under this standard, politically motivated people can, at little cost to themselves, make accusations that entangle adversaries in expensive speech-halting proceedings during a campaign.
The SBA List’s brief to the Supreme Court notes that “a law requiring citizens to pay $1 before they could publicly comment on electoral issues or candidates for office would be immediately justiciable (and promptly invalidated).” Yet Ohio’s law makes it easy for literally millions of Ohioans to subject participants in the political process to much more expensive costs — not to mention the threat of incarceration.
The Ohio Elections Commission has pondered the truth or falsity of saying that a school board “turned control of the district over to the union” and that a city councilor had “a habit of telling voters one thing, then doing another.” Fortunately, the Supreme Court, citing George Orwell’s “1984,” has held thateven false statements receive First Amendment protection: “Our constitutional tradition stands against the idea that we need Oceania’s Ministry of Truth.”
Wall Street Journal: Supreme Court to Consider Challenge to Law Against Lying in Elections
By Jessie Bravin
“It almost never comes to a criminal prosecution, but that doesn’t mean there’s no chilling effect on speech,” Daniel Tokaji, a law professor at Ohio State University who isn’t involved in the case, said of the law.
More than a dozen other states have laws authorizing criminal or civil penalties for spreading falsehoods in political campaigns. The Supreme Court’s eventual ruling, expected by June, is unlikely to affect the state laws or political discourse in the current elections cycle. The case would instead likely be sent back for lower courts to consider whether the false-statement law violates the First Amendment by improperly suppressing protected speech
Disclosure
Sunlight Foundation: Quietly, American Crossroads raises money from LLCs
By Sarah Harkins
After an anemic February — when American Crossroads brought in only $260,000 — the super PAC scored big in March, raising over $5.2 million, including big checks from familiar donors like hedge fund mogul Paul Singer, leveraged buyout artist John W. Childs and former Univision chairman Jerry Perenchio, who chipped in $2 million.
But while big donors came up big in March, a pair of obscure companies made up more than half of American Crossroads’ more modest take in February — ones that do not disclose their ownership in corporate filings.
Read more…
FEC
Wall Street Journal: BitBeat: Bitcoin and Political Donations
By PAUL VIGNA and MICHAEL J. CASEY
How the Commission responds could come down to a compromise between competing visions articulated in two draft responses to the PAC’s request, both of which were posted on the FEC’s website last week. One FEC approach would limit bitcoin donations to no more than the equivalent of $100 per donor, would require that the bitcoins be converted into cash within 10 days and would prohibit the PAC from making its own expenditures in the digital currency. The other would be more permissive, imposing no limits on the value and allowing the PAC to treat the coins as donations in kind and to directly use them for expenditures.
State and Local
Virginia –– Washington Post: Another blow to former Va. governor McDonnell’s defense in corruption case
By Matt Zapotosky
A judge on Thursday rejected a request by the couple’s attorneys to file completely secret declarations about the testimony their clients would give if their trials were separated. The attorneys had wanted to file the declarations and keep prosecutors and the public from reviewing them to support their bid to sever the cases.
U.S. District Judge James R. Spencer said that though defense attorneys could file the declarations under seal — shielding them from public view — they could not keep them from prosecutors. He wrote that defense attorneys bore a heavy burden in persuading him to review the declarations without prosecutors’ input because that “would effectively deprive the court of an adversarial proceeding in a complex determination.”
