This is the Daily Media Update published by the Institute for Free Speech. For press inquiries, please contact [email protected].
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New from the Institute for Free Speech
.....Bradley A. Smith, Chairman of the Institute for Free Speech and a former Chairman of the Federal Election Commission, released the following statement Wednesday morning:
“The criminal case against Donald Trump lacks a necessary element: there is no federal campaign finance violation.
“I said the same thing about the federal prosecution against John Edwards—the behavior was appalling but not illegal under federal campaign finance laws.
“In the case of Mr. Trump, the question of using personal funds to pay ‘hush money’ to a pornographic actress is not a campaign expense, even if he thought it would help him win the election.
“It’s true that the Federal Election Campaign Act defines both ‘expenditure’ and ‘contribution’ as payments ‘for the purpose of influencing any election.’ Yet, almost anything a candidate does can be interpreted as ‘influencing an election.’
“And because campaign finance law impacts core First Amendment free speech rights, the Supreme Court has held that the law must be rooted in clear, objective standards..."
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Supreme Court
.....Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen led a coalition of 17 other state attorneys general calling on the United States Supreme Court to reverse a lower court’s decision giving officials license to stifle their political opponents’ protected speech by financially crippling them. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit dismissed a case brought by the National Rifle Association case against Maria Vullo, the former superintendent of New York’s Department of Financial Services (DFS), who trampled on the NRA’s First Amendment right.
Vullo, who had regulatory authority over financial institutions in the state, engaged in a politically motivated campaign against the financial institutions doing business with the NRA but steered clear of any explicit threats. But the financial institutions got the message to “drop the NRA or else,” the attorneys general wrote. In the amicus brief filed Wednesday, the attorneys general ask the Supreme Court to protect Americans’ right to free speech from woke government officials.
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Congress
By Sharon Zhang
.....Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) has introduced a bill that would end corporate personhood with the goal of reversing Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission...
The We the People Amendment, introduced in the House with 26 cosponsors, proposes a Constitutional Amendment that would establish that only people — not “artificial entities” like lobbying groups and corporations — have rights given by the Constitution...
Jayapal’s bill is similar in aim to the Democracy for All Act, a bill introduced in January, also sponsored by Jayapal, with the same goal of ending Citizens United. However, the bills vary in their mechanisms.
As Move to Amend, a sponsor of the bill, explains in a fact sheet, the We the People Amendment goes slightly further than the Democracy For All Act.
The We the People Amendment would seek to end corporate personhood at the federal level, which the Democracy For All Act doesn’t address, according to the fact sheet. And We the People would create a mandate to limit contributions and expenditures, including for self-funding candidates, while Democracy for All only specifies that Congress and state legislators “may” create such limits.
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FEC
By Paul Bedard
.....“It's not a campaign finance violation. It's not a reporting violation of any kind,” said FEC Commissioner James E. “Trey” Trainor.
In trying to stretch the law to make it look like a violation, he added, District Attorney Alvin Bragg “is really trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole.” ...
“I don't know how you get around the evidence that both the Department of Justice in their investigation of the federal campaign finance issues and the Federal Election Commission in their ultimate jurisdiction over campaign finance issues, neither of them found there to be any violations whatsoever, and I think the jury is going to see that and they're going to have to rely upon the fact that both the law enforcement experts and the civil enforcement experts, as far as campaign finance are concerned, didn't find any violation of the law here,” said Trainor.
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By Dan McLaughlin
.....It is worth explaining two weighty reasons why a court might reasonably bar state prosecutors from using their powers to enforce federal campaign-finance laws.
One is the clarity and uniformity of the law. Federal campaign-finance laws are a dense and often contradictory and counterintuitive thicket of rules. Ideally, in a nation of laws that wishes to permit people to engage in democratic elections, we should prefer that every campaign understands and complies with them, which is undermined if even the lawyers who advise campaigns aren’t sure what the law is. At present, those laws are enforced by a single federal sovereign, acting through two entities (the Federal Election Commission and the Department of Justice) and subjecting their interpretations to the judgment of the federal courts. Occasionally, as happened in the John Edwards case — construing much the same questions of federal rules that are at issue here — those two federal, executive-branch entities will reach opposing conclusions about what the law is, an outcome that is itself a reason to doubt the propriety of the FEC’s independence from the Article II chain of command. Still, for the most part, the federal government can speak with one voice.
If the federal campaign-finance laws are instead to be enforced by the more than 3,000 county prosecutors in the country, and interpreted by the courts of all 50 states, none of them steeped in the intricate arcana of campaign-finance regulation, the task of keeping up on what the law isand advising candidates on how to comply with it becomes vastly more difficult and complex, and the whole concept of fair notice of written law collapses — and buries in the rubble of that collapse the very beating heart of democracy, campaigns for public office.
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By Kristine Parks
.....Bolton, a Yale Law School graduate, feared the case could "easily" get dismissed before it went to trial.
Bragg was "just wrong" to suggest that a New York election law could supersede federal election laws, he argued.
"And I just what I understood the District Attorney to say that he thinks there’s a New York election law involved here. All I can say is the Federal Election Campaign Act [of 1971] absolutely preempts any state or local law to the contrary. How could it be otherwise? You’ve got one law governing corporate finance and a presidential election at the federal level. You’re gonna have 50 state laws interfering with it, so he’s just wrong on the applicability of the New York statute," Bolton said.
A legal expert and former member of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) agreed, telling Fox News Digital that Bragg is "way off base" if the state charges are based on a violation of federal campaign finance laws.
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Free Expression
By The Editorial Board
.....Diversity enforcers have become speech enforcers on many college campuses, but a few schools are starting to articulate some limits. The latest is Cornell University, which has refused to adopt a student resolution that would have required “trigger warnings” anytime an upsetting subject is mentioned in the classroom.
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The States
By Eugene Volokh
.....I thought I'd blog this week about the Florida libel law reform bills, the House version (which was favorably reported out of the Civil Justice Subcommittee to the Judiciary Committee) and the Senate version (which passed by an 8-3 vote in the Judiciary Committee and is now in the Rules Committee). There are many different parts to them, so I thought I'd take them one at a time. I also thought I'd start with the most ambitious changes.
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The Institute for Free Speech is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that promotes and defends the First Amendment rights to freely speak, assemble, publish, and petition the government. Please support the Institute's mission by clicking here. For further information, visit www.ifs.org.
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