January 4, 2024

In the News

WORLD Radio: Free speech at the library

.....Ed. note: Institute for Free Speech Vice President for Litigation Alan Gura spoke to WORLD Radio about Moms for Liberty -Yolo County v. Lopez.

ICYMI

Wall Street Journal: Minnesota’s Xenophobic Restrictions on Speech

By Bradley A. Smith and Eric Wang

.....A federal judge on Monday will consider a Minnesota law that surreptitiously attempts to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s holding in Citizens United v. FEC (2010) that corporations have a constitutional right to speak independently about politics.

While Citizens United and other judicial decisions have loosened restrictions on corporate political speech, courts have upheld longstanding bans on political speech by foreign nationals. Therefore, Minnesota and other opponents of corporate speech now seek to redefine large swaths of American businesses as “foreign influenced” to stop their political engagement. Seattle, St. Petersburg, Fla., and Alaska have joined Minnesota in passing laws banning political speech by so-called foreign-influenced corporations. Lawmakers in numerous other states and Congress have introduced similar bills.

Ed. note: The above op-ed was originally published December 17, 2023. See the below KSTP article for an update.

The Courts

KSTP: Judge blocks Minnesota law that banned campaign contributions from ‘foreign investors’

By Josh Skluzacek

.....A law regarding campaign contributions for Minnesota candidates that was set to take effect on Jan. 1 can’t be enforced, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Court Judge Eric Tostrud granted a preliminary injunction that the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce had requested, stopping a law that aimed to limit foreign influence in local elections.

The law, which was crafted by lawmakers earlier this year, would’ve made it illegal for candidates to accept money from any foreign officials. That included corporations with a foreign ownership share of as little as 1%.

But the Chamber of Commerce, which represents more than 6,000 Minnesota businesses, argued that the law would violate the First Amendment by preventing some organizations from exercising their free speech rights in connection with elections.

Podcasts

Early Returns - Law and Politics with Jan Baran: Sean Cooksey Shares FEC Menu for 2024

.....As with the previous two season kick-offs of Early Returns, we welcome the third season with the newly elected 2024 chair of the Federal Election Commission, Sean Cooksey, who is a republican. The FEC consists of six bipartisan commissioners with no more than three from the same political party. It takes the vote of four commissioners to take any major action.  

Chair Cooksey has three of his six years under his belt serving on the FEC. He and Jan discuss what the FEC is doing in preparing for the 2024 election and his agenda as chair, including artificial intelligence and candidate security considerations.  

Free Expression

The Free Press: Bill Ackman: How to Fix Harvard

By Bill Ackman

.....The DEI movement has also taken control of speech. Certain speech is no longer permitted. So-called “microaggressions” are treated like hate speech. “Trigger warnings” are required to protect students. “Safe spaces” are necessary to protect students from the trauma inflicted by words that are challenging to the students’ newly acquired worldviews. Campus speakers and faculty with unapproved views are shouted down, shunned, and canceled.

These speech codes have led to self-censorship by students and faculty of views privately held, but no longer shared. There is no commitment to free expression at Harvard other than for DEI-approved views. This has led to the quashing of conservative and other viewpoints from the Harvard campus and faculty, and contributed to Harvard’s having the lowest free speech ranking of 248 universities assessed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

The Atlantic: How October 7 Changed America’s Free-Speech Culture

By Conor Friedersdorf

.....Old-school liberals can simply go on championing free-speech values. But the “woke” or “identitarian” left cannot go on as before. Having long agitated for more sweeping speech restrictions and taboos, they now confront a dilemma: They do not want “woke” hate speech or sensitivity standards applied to Palestinian-aligned activists, and they are unwilling to police speech that unnerves many Jews in the way that they policed speech they considered upsetting to other identity groups; yet they cannot subject Jews to such a blatant double standard without alienating many Americans and losing moral standing and attendant influence.

Nonprofits

Election Law Blog: Final Version of My Paper, “Nonprofit Law as the Tool to Kill What Remains of Campaign Finance Law: Reluctant Lessons from Ellen Aprill,” Now Available

By Rick Hasen

.....You can read it here, and the citation is 56 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. 1233 (2023).

Abstract:

The States

People United for Privacy: Arizona Nonprofits Face Chaos Under “Dark Money” Law as 2024 Elections Near

By Luke Wachob

.....Arizona’s experiment in regulating nonprofits like political action committees is set to begin. No one is ready for it.

The Secretary of State’s office has not set up the online portal where groups are required to file their reports. The Citizens Clean Elections Commission (CCEC) has failed to answer numerous questions about the law’s meaning and implementation. And the federal lawsuit challenging the law as unconstitutional has yet to be heard.

Despite all of that, the law will cover ads starting in February, a full six months before the state holds primary elections in August.

Arizona officials had plenty of time to prepare for this moment. Voters approved Prop 211 over a year ago in November of 2022. Concerns over how the law would be implemented were voiced even before the election (including by People United for Privacy). Lawsuits challenging various aspects of the measure were filed soon after.