The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech May 31, 2023 Click here to subscribe to the Daily Media Update. This is the Daily Media Update published by the Institute for Free Speech. For press inquiries, please contact [email protected]. In the News Washington Examiner: The IRS still plays political speech police By Bradley A. Smith .....This month marked the 10th anniversary of the Tea Party scandal: The first public admission by then-Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner that the IRS had targeted conservative groups due to their political views. The revelation that the IRS discriminated against organizations with words such as “patriot” or “Tea Party” in their names caused an appropriate uproar in 2013. Yet a decade later, nothing has happened to correct the improper role the IRS plays as “political speech police.” While the Lerner scandal was an egregious example of political bias in a federal agency, it is hardly unique. New from the Institute for Free Speech Coalition Letter in Support of Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt’s Veto of House Bill 1236 .....The undersigned organizations, which represent a broad coalition across the political spectrum, thank you for vetoing House Bill 1236. The Oklahoma Citizens Participation Act is one of the nation’s best anti-SLAPP laws. HB 1236 would significantly weaken that law’s protections for citizens faced with expensive and meritless lawsuits (known as SLAPPs, or Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) aimed at silencing their speech. The bill would remove current law’s requirement that a speaker who successfully files an anti-SLAPP motion to dismiss a meritless case be awarded fees to recover litigation costs. This is a vital deterrent against SLAPP lawsuits. Without an award, a defendant might win the lawsuit, but still suffer financial devastation from costs owed to their lawyers... Thank you, Governor Stitt, for safeguarding the Oklahoma Citizens Participation Act that protects citizens’ rights to speech, press, assembly, and petition. PDF ICYMI Do States with Fewer Campaign Finance Regulations Have More Corruption? By Alec Greven .....This report examines the relationship between the states with the most corruption and the states that offer the widest range of free political expression. The states that perform the best on free political expression metrics, in this context, are those that have the fewest campaign finance restrictions. If more campaign finance regulations indeed prevent corruption, then we would expect that states with the least campaign finance restrictions to have higher rates of corruption. The report finds the opposite. Almost no states that rank highly for free political expression are highly ranked states for corruption. In fact, states that have the most robust free expression protections outperform the national average for per capita rates of corruption. PDF Supreme Court Slate: The Urgent Warning That Got Cut From a Supreme Court Opinion 20 Years Ago By Richard L. Hasen .....More than 20 years ago, then–Supreme Court Justice David Souter tried to warn that big money in politics risked turning United States officials into tools of an emerging “plutocracy.” We now know from recently released case files that Souter had to strike the language in his draft Supreme Court opinion in a 2000 campaign finance case, Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC, as the price to secure Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s vote. It’s too bad, because Souter’s warning is one that American political leaders, including justices on the Supreme Court itself, needed to hear. That warning was never made and thus never heeded. Today, American plutocracy—from Congress to inside the walls of the court itself—is alive and well. Justice Souter was one of the most important, if underrated, voices among Supreme Court justices on questions of money in politics. His opinion in Shrink Missouri and similar cases in the early 2000s offered a jurisprudence of the First Amendment that is so different from the current Citizens United–fueled era in which limits on money in politics are mostly meaningless. The Courts New York Times: Missteps and Miscalculations: Inside Fox’s Legal and Business Debacle By Jim Rutenberg, Michael S. Schmidt and Jeremy W. Peters .....In August 2021, the Fox Corporation board of directors gathered on the company’s movie studio lot in Los Angeles. Among the topics on the agenda: Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against its cable news network, Fox News. The suit posed a threat to the company’s finances and reputation. But Fox’s chief legal officer, Viet Dinh, reassured the board: Even if the company lost at trial, it would ultimately prevail. The First Amendment was on Fox’s side, he explained, even if proving so could require going to the Supreme Court. Mr. Dinh told others inside the company that Fox’s possible legal costs, at tens of millions of dollars, could outstrip any damages the company would have to pay to Dominion. That determination informed a series of missteps and miscalculations over the next 20 months, according to a New York Times review of court and business records, and interviews with roughly a dozen people directly involved in or briefed on the company’s decision-making. State Department Washington Examiner: Biden State Department 'stands by' disinformation grant to conservative blacklister By Gabe Kaminsky .....The State Department "stands by" its widely scrutinized grant to a group the Washington Examiner revealed is blacklisting conservative media outlets, according to a letter to Congress. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) put the State Department's Global Engagement Center on blast in a March letter to the agency and demanded an investigation into its $100,000 grant in 2021 to the Global Disinformation Index, which has fed conservative website blacklists to advertisers to defund disfavored speech. The agency issued a response to the congressman on Friday, telling him in a letter obtained by the Washington Examiner that it has no regrets over the taxpayer-backed award. Online Speech Platforms Daily Beast: Social Media Age Requirements Are Anti-Free Speech By Jeff Kosseff .....Since the dawn of the commercial internet, Americans have spoken and accessed information online without providing their names. Political dissidents freely express their views. Patients search for health information without fearing public embarrassment. Domestic violence victims seek help online, shielding their communications from their abusers. State and federal lawmakers threaten to upend that culture of anonymity. And that should worry all Americans. In March, Utah enacted a law that requires parental consent for children under 18 to use social media, and it requires platforms to “verify the age” of all Utah residents. In April, Arkansas passed a similar law, requiring social media companies to use “reasonable age verification.” And in Congress, a bipartisan group has introduced the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, which requires social media platforms to “take reasonable steps” to verify users’ ages. Candidates and Campaigns The Atlantic: Political Campaigns May Never Be the Same By Russell Berman .....Depending on whom you ask in politics, the sudden advances in artificial intelligence will either transform American democracy for the better or bring about its ruin. At the moment, the doomsayers are louder... Amid the growing panic, however, a new generation of tech entrepreneurs is selling a more optimistic future for the merger of AI and politics. In their telling, the awesome automating power of AI has the potential to achieve in a few years what decades of attempted campaign-finance reform have failed to do—dramatically reduce the cost of running for election in the United States. With AI’s ability to handle a campaign’s most mundane and time-consuming tasks—think churning out press releases or identifying and targeting supporters—candidates would have less need to hire high-priced consultants. The result could be a more open and accessible democracy, in which small, bare-bones campaigns can compete with well-funded juggernauts. CBS News: DeSantis campaign will receive $500K raised by super PAC, a source says. Campaign finance experts call it "unprecedented" By Aaron Navarro .....Campaign finance experts called the move “unprecedented” and had mixed reactions on if it violated FEC regulations.The transfer of “hard” campaign dollars — money raised under federal fundraising limits — from a super PAC to a campaign has not ever been tried, largely because different laws govern the two types of fundraising entities. But in this case, Paul Seamus Ryan, a campaign finance expert, told CBS News that Never Back Down is “seemingly circumventing” a prohibition on super PACs directly transferring donations to the campaign, by using the separate draft committee PAC. “Any way you slice it, this is an unprecedented fundraising tactic,” he said. The States Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Even after election, Georgia law gives Kemp, Jones big-money edge By James Salzer .....After he was outspent by Democrat Stacey Abrams in 2018, Republican lawmakers backing Gov. Brian Kemp didn’t want to see a repeat in 2022. So almost two years before the Kemp-Abrams rematch, they passed a law allowing Kemp and a limited number of others to create committees that could raise unlimited contributions — ignoring donation limits everyone else had to follow — and even collect money during legislative sessions. Abrams still outraised Kemp in 2022, but the incumbent handily won reelection. And now he’s showing how the leadership law guarantees him the financial muscle to sell his political agenda, raise his national profile and prepare for a possible U.S. Senate race in 2026. It also provides Kemp the wherewithal to sustain a kind of shadow Republican Party after spending the past two years feeling under attack from former President Donald Trump and some state party leaders... State Sen. Jason Esteves, D-Atlanta, filed legislation late in the 2023 session to eliminate the committees, which would force all candidates to follow the same fundraising rules — such as donation limits — again. It didn’t go anywhere in the Republican-dominated Senate, and Esteves said that’s not surprising. “The law is intended to keep those in power in power and disadvantage those who are not in power,” Esteves said. “It is purely used to give Republicans and incumbents in general a huge advantage.” NBC News: Ron DeSantis administration officials solicit campaign cash from lobbyists By Matt Dixon and Jonathan Allen .....Officials who work for Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration — not his campaign — have been sending text messages to Florida lobbyists soliciting political contributions for DeSantis' presidential bid, a breach of traditional norms that has raised ethical and legal questions and left many here in the state capital shocked. Philadelphia Inquirer: Philly’s ethics board usually flies under the radar. That changed with its lawsuit against a super PAC backing Jeff Brown. By Sean Collins Walsh .....The regulation of super PACs is almost nonexistent in federal elections. But in Philadelphia, the ethics board actively enforces its campaign finance rules, and in December, Creamer and board chair Michael H. Reed published an opinion piece in The Inquirer to remind everyone. “We were planting a flag in the ground and really trying to warn people that Philadelphia is different,” Creamer said in an interview Thursday. “We didn’t know what was going to happen. Frankly, we were concerned we were going to be overwhelmed with issues with multiple super PACs.” The board ended up spending much of its time dealing with one super PAC, For a Better Philadelphia, which raised about $3 million to boost ShopRite proprietor and first-time candidate Jeff Brown in the mayor’s race. The board’s investigation into the group had an obvious effect: It upended the mayor’s race and damaged Brown’s chances of becoming mayor. But it also exposed to scrutiny the choices of the small but important city agency that plays a role in every Philadelphia election but is often invisible to voters. Creamer said he initiated the investigation into the super PAC on his own accord. He declined to say what sparked his interest. 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." 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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