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
.....The Institute for Free Speech is happy to announce the addition of two new attorneys to its legal team in recent months, Brett Nolan and Courtney Corbello.
Brett joined the Institute for Free Speech as an Attorney in January of 2023. He previously served as Principal Deputy Solicitor General of Kentucky, where he litigated dozens of cases on behalf of the state, including a successful challenge to a federal law limiting the ability of states to modify their tax codes.
Prior to that, Brett served as the Deputy General Counsel to the former Governor of Kentucky, where he advised the governor and other executive branch officials on a variety of legal and policy issues and represented them in litigation. Brett clerked for Judge John Nalbandian of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and Judge Karen K. Caldwell of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky. Between clerkships, he worked in private practice.
Brett attended the University of Chicago Law School, where he served as an editor of The University of Chicago Law Review and graduated with High Honors, Order of the Coif...
Courtney joined the Institute for Free Speech as an Attorney in April 2023. Courtney is a former member of the US Army where she served as a Cryptological Linguist specializing in Mandarin. After serving, Courtney then went on to attend UCLA Law School where she was a member and Vice President in the UCLA Moot Court Team. She was the sole recipient in her graduating class of the Order of the Barristers Statue as for being the top oral advocate among her peers. She was also the winner of the Roscoe Pound Moot Court Competition...
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The Courts
By Natalie Hanson
.....A federal judge has tossed a lawsuit challenging a Silicon Valley city’s ordinance requiring lobbyists to pay a fee and fill out a disclosure form in order to speak to a city official.
The League of Women Voters of Cupertino-Sunnyvale organization filed a civil rights suit against the city of Cupertino in 2022, claiming the city’s lobbying disclosure ordinance violates the free speech and petition clauses of state and federal law, and is an overbroad, speaker-based and content-based regulation that chills protected First Amendment expression.
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By Margot Cleveland
.....The members of the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project conspired with government actors to censor speech at Big Tech companies in violation of the First Amendment, a class-action lawsuit filed on Tuesday alleges. The case, Hines v. Stamos, promises to blow open the Censorship-Industrial Complex.
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Congress
By Isaac Stanley-Becker
.....On Tuesday, Rep. Yvette D. Clarke (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation that would require disclosure of AI-generated content in political ads — part of an effort, she said, to “get the Congress going on addressing many of the challenges that we’re facing with AI.” ...
Clarke’s bill would amend federal campaign finance law to require that political ads include a statement disclosing any use of AI-generated imagery. The Federal Election Commission recently tightened rules about sponsorship disclaimers for digital ads, making clear that the requirement to disclose who paid for ads promoted on websites also apply to advertising on other platforms, such as social media and streaming sites.
Additional reform is made necessary by “revolutionary innovations” in AI technology, as well as the potential “use of generative AI that harms our democracy,” according to Clarke’s bill.
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Fundraising
By David Byler
.....Small-dollar donors were supposed to save democracy. Reformers had hoped that grass-roots political fundraising — connected by the internet and united against corruption — would become a formidable force to counter the money that wealthy individuals funnel to candidates.
Only half of that would become true. Small-dollar donors are indeed powerful today — but they have made politics worse, not better.
This has manifested in different ways depending on the party. For Republicans, small-dollar donors have bankrolled bomb-throwers who treat Congress like the Thunderdome. For Democrats, they have wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on ridiculous, fantasy-driven campaigns. And even when they flood a race with cash, they do little to lessen the influence of big donors.
Let’s start with Republicans, for whom the problem is more troubling. Grass-root donors in the party have rewarded anti-establishment firebrands and conspiracy theorists who specialize in televised political stunts. Just take a look at the top recipients of small donations:
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The States
.....Twenty-two states, six Colorado state legislators, and multiple advocacy groups have filed friend-of-the-court briefs with the Colorado Supreme Court, asking it to uphold the First Amendment freedoms of cake artist Jack Phillips and Masterpiece Cakeshop. Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys representing Phillips and his cake shop filed an appeal last month with the state’s high court after an appeals court held that the state can force Phillips to express messages that violate his beliefs.
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By Luke Wachob
.....In 2019, New Jersey found itself in court after attempting to require nonprofit advocacy groups to publicly expose their supporters’ names and home addresses through the passage of S. 150. In an unusual twist, Governor Phil Murphy (D) expressed concern about the bill’s constitutionality when he signed it into law.
“I am concerned that extending the disclosure requirements to cover advocacy that is not connected to an issue before the electorate may infringe upon constitutionally protected speech and association rights,” Governor Murphy warned in his signing statement. “As detailed in my [veto message for S. 1500], the United States Supreme Court has long recognized the harm that overly broad disclosure requirements can cause to an organization, its mission and its members.”
Facing scrutiny of his former staffers’ involvement with a nonprofit, however, Governor Murphy was pressured by the then-Senate President to sign the legislation. It was up to the nonprofit community to clean up the state’s mess. Fortunately, several groups – including the ACLU of New Jersey and Americans for Prosperity, among others – soon challenged the law in federal court as a violation of their First Amendment rights.
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By Dylan Sharkey
.....Gov. J.B. Pritzker advocated for campaign finance reform at a student forum hosted by Harvard University recently.
“Do I think the self-funding campaigns are the answer to politics? No, absolutely not,” Pritzker said. “We need campaign finance reform both in Illinois and nationally.”
Pritzker spent $323 million between his 2018 and 2022 campaigns. On top of self-financing his campaign, Pritzker donated $24 million to the Democratic Governors Association.
Pritzker also showed how to skirt campaign finance rules. The two biggest donors for Illinois Supreme Court Justices Mary Kay O’Brien and Elizabeth Rochford were “JB for Governor” and the “Jay Robert Pritzker Revocable Trust.”
By donating through his trust as well as his campaign committee, Pritzker circumvented a campaign finance law he himself signed prohibiting “any single person” from donating more than $500,000 to a state judicial campaign.
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Read an article you think we would be interested in? Send it to Tiffany Donnelly at [email protected]. For email filters, the subject of this email will always begin with "Institute for Free Speech Media Update."
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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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