In the News

UCLA Newsroom: Newly minted UCLA School of Law graduate argues before Ninth Circuit

By Joshua Rich

Elizabeth Arias graduated from UCLA School of Law in May and immediately turned her attention to the first major test of her legal career… 

On June 16, Arias delivered oral argument before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in French v. Jones, a First Amendment case with potentially far-reaching implications for election-related speech.

Seizing an exceedingly rare opportunity for someone just a few weeks out of law school, Arias represented the Center for Competitive Politics, a nonprofit for which UCLA Law professor Eugene Volokh and the students in his Scott and Cyan Banister First Amendment Clinic researched and drafted an amicus curiae brief. That document supported Mark French, a 2014 candidate for justice of the peace in Sanders County, Montana, who was barred by state law from saying that the Republican Party had endorsed him. French lost that race, but his challenge to the statute has lived on.

“The case is about whether judges can associate with a political party and whether the Montana law unfairly burdens judicial speech,” said Arias, who argued that the law violates the U.S. Constitution’s protections of free speech and association.

CCP

Ossoff Outspends Opponent’s Campaign 5-1 but Complains About “Money in Politics”

Ossoff received substantially more direct contributions than his opponent, and had an overall spending advantage – even when including spending by Super PACs.

“Jon Ossoff raised a ton of money because people wanted to send a message to Washington DC. Voters got to hear his message, and they rejected it. Someone who wanted to serve in Congress should know that’s how democracy works,” said CCP President David Keating. “Would Jon Ossoff have preferred that a Federal Election Commission controlled by President Trump put a severe limit on his campaign spending? Does he think the answer is less speech? Or does he simply want to silence those with differing views?”

“We should be grateful that 41 years ago the Supreme Court struck down severe congressional campaign spending limits that would have limited campaign speech.”

“The argument that money buys elections was proven wrong again Tuesday. Karen Handel was massively outspent, and won. Money is simply a tool for voters to hear information about candidates. Why would we want voters to know less, and not more?” added Keating.

Supreme Court

SCOTUSblog: Symposium: Most important free speech case in many years

By Hugh Hansen

Matal v. Tam is one of the most important First Amendment free speech cases to come along in many years. The result is not much of a surprise. . . What was a surprise was how strongly all eight justices viewed the applicable free speech protection.

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion meticulously addressed all arguments, making sure there were no loose ends to clutter future cases. His style was critical and even mocking. He left no doubts on the merits of the free speech issues. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion took more of a Gordian knot approach. No need to worry about untying various threads and arguments; viewpoint discrimination allows us to just cut right through them. The purpose of both opinions appeared to be to make sure that there was no way around the Supreme Court’s conclusions in the future…

Free speech up until now has been a hothouse flower. It was beautiful to look at in its protected state, but out in the elements it rarely survived, let alone thrived. Matal v. Tam creates the possibility of breaking down those glass walls. The question is whether that is premature or whether free speech can survive outside on its own. I guess that will depend to some extent on what you and I do.

Free Speech

Reason: Students Hold Free Speech Events, Get Denounced as White Supremacists

By Christian Britschgi

Faculty and students at Linfield College have compared the campus chapter of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) to terrorists and denounced them as white supremacists. Why? Because the libertarian student group attempted to host a series of free speech events at the small liberal arts college in McMinnville, Oregon…

Next the school declared that it would be cancelling an upcoming event in the “speak freely” series-a talk on ethics and free speech by the University of Toronto psychologist Jordan Peterson. The libertarian group was told the paperwork for the event had been turned in a day late…

Meanwhile, faculty lashed out at the YAL chapter in the campus paper, The Linfield Review.

“The agenda of groups like Alt-Right and campus clubs that are either supported by the Alt-right or providing a platform for the Alt-Right is clear,” wrote Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt, a professor of English…

At the free speech forum, Dutt-Ballerstadt had accused Smith and his group of being funded by “alt-right dark money.”

National Review: Anti-Free-Speech Radicals Never Give Up

By David French

As I wrote immediately after the decision, it would have been shocking if the Court hadn’t ruled against the PTO. After all, there are literally decades of First Amendment precedents prohibiting the government from engaging in punitive viewpoint discrimination, even when the viewpoint expressed is deemed hatred or offensive…

But not even a ruling joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor can persuade determined, far-left censors, and just as sure as night follows day, Laura Beth Nielsen, a research professor for the American Bar Foundation, took to the pages of the Los Angeles Times to make the case for viewpoint discrimination…

Interestingly, the day before Nielsen’s call for censorship appeared in the Los Angeles Times, German police raided the homes of 36 people accused of hateful social-media postings. That’s where prohibitions against hate speech lead. Indeed, wannabe American censors often extol Europe as a model for their proposed American laws. Do you trust the government to decide when your viewpoint is unacceptable?

FEC

Bloomberg BNA: FEC Eyes Moves to Curb Foreign Influence

By Kenneth P. Doyle

The Federal Election Commission needs to do more to reassure the American public that it takes seriously the threat of foreign interference in U.S. elections, Democratic FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub said in a new memorandum.

Weintraub’s memorandum, prepared ahead of an FEC open meeting set for June 22, proposed a range of regulatory and investigative options and called for action on pending enforcement complaints from the 2016 election, which allege illegal foreign influence…

Weintraub’s new memo said: “The mere allegation that foreign interference may have occurred shakes the faith of Americans in our democracy. The FEC must find out the facts of what happened during the 2016 U.S. presidential election and move swiftly and firmly to fix any problems we find.”…

Weintraub also said the FEC should get briefings from other agencies on the investigation of Russian interference and should examine whether the FEC’s own enforcement division has enough resources to pursue foreign-influence cases.

Washington Examiner: FEC punts vote on expanding Russia probe to Facebook, Drudge, companies

By Paul Bedard

In a quick and abrupt move, the Federal Election Commision kicked a decision to jump into the ever-expanding investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election to next month.

The decision was a surprise, apparently even to the proponent, Democratic Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, who pledged, “I’ll be back.”

The move was made by the chairman of the FEC, Democratic Commissioner Steven Walther. He suggested that she had changed her proposal at the last minute and that the commission needed time to review those…

Weintraub has tried to expand the FEC’s investigative powers to foreign companies before, and been blocked.

Critics of her new proposal said that it goes far beyond the authority of the FEC, especially because she wants to look into state election records.

Congress

Reason: Sen. Feinstein: Protecting College Free Speech from Violent Protests Is Too Much of a Burden

By Scott Shackford

Ultimately, Feinstein’s objection to protecting controversial speech is that of the bureaucrat disguised as the concerned nanny. When people intent on violence show up at protests, other people can get hurt. But colleges have limited resources, she argues-so why should campus police be expected to be able handle protests if they get seriously out of hand?

“You don’t think we learned a lesson from Kent State way back when?” she asked at one point, a fascinating reply that illustrates so much about her mind-set. Feinstein’s argument seems to be that the killing of four college students by members of the National Guard would have been prevented if the government hadn’t allowed the protests in the first place.

Fortunately, lovers of liberty were well-represented on the panel by UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, who patiently explained that, yes, publicly funded colleges are expected to make sure the civil liberties of the students on their campus are protected appropriately by law enforcement. “One important job of the government is to prevent violence, and to prevent violence without suppressing free speech,” he said in response.

Candidates and Campaigns

Washington Examiner: Jon Ossoff spent six times more than Karen Handel but complains about ‘money in politics’

By Philip Wegmann 

Before the special election polls closed, the 30-year-old aspiring boy wonder went on NPR to complain about money in politics.

“The role of money in politics is a major problem and particularly the role of unchecked anonymous money,” Ossoff said. “There have been super PACs in Washington who have been putting up tens of millions of dollars of attack ads in air for months now.”

And then with just a day to go and apparently un-ironically, Ossoff offered up the most unaware statement of the entire race: “We need campaign finance reform.”

Simple arithmetic shows the stupidity of that sentiment. According to campaign finance documents compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, Ossoff spent six times more money than Handel. His campaign raised more than $24 million to her $4.5 million.

At that point, Ossoff groupies will protest that Handel benefited from super PAC spending. After all, they argue, the Republican benefited from $18.2 million in outside spending compared to the Democrat’s $8 million from outside groups…

If you take the sum of campaign and outside spending together, it’s clear that millions more flowed to Ossoff’s cause.

But it didn’t matter. Handel still won by more than 10,000 votes.

BillMoyers.com: Dark Money Turns Elections Into Trench Warfare

By Ciara Torres-Spelliscy

In 1920 journalist Walter Lippmann wrote in Liberty and the News, of World War I, “[n]obody, for example, saw this war. Neither the men in the trenches nor the commanding general. The men saw their trenches, their billets, sometimes they saw an enemy trench, but nobody, unless it be the aviators, saw a battle.” Dark money in our elections leads to similar myopia where the public can’t tell what’s really going on as they are asked to do their civic duty and cast their ballots.

On Tuesday, there was a special election to replace Rep. Price who was elevated to become the Secretary of Health and Human Services in Georgia’s 6th District. In the end Karen Handel (R) won the open seat against Jon Ossoff (D). This special election turned into the most expensive congressional race in American history…

But the Georgia’s 6th District race was also notable because of the amount of dark money spent in the race. By “dark money,” I mean money spent in an election which is untraceable for voters. Most dark money becomes dark by being routed through opaque nonprofits such as 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations or 501(c)(6) trade associations.