August 19, 2024

The Courts

Washington Post: U.S. looks to ban election betting as traders flock to prediction sites

By Tony Romm

.....The U.S. government has embarked on a broad crackdown against election betting, relying on a mix of newly proposed rules and ongoing court cases to try to stamp out a nascent industry that critics call a potential threat to democracy.

To Democrats, these wagers on the outcome of a particular campaign invite more money into an electoral system that’s already rife with it. But the staunchest backers of political prediction marketplaces insist that the fears of election interference are overstated — and that the insights gleaned from their data serve a greater purpose.

New York Times: This Georgia Republican Defied Trump. Now He’s Fighting a Defamation Suit.

By Nick Corasaniti

.....Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, has been forced to spend half a million dollars defending himself in court for having stood up to former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The only way to spare himself from the defamation lawsuit he has been fighting, he and his lawyer say, would be to lie…

Mr. Raffensperger fears that the lawsuit could be a harbinger of a new kind of harassment: wealthy activists burying election officials in costly litigation as a form of coercion.

“I have incurred over $500,000 in legal fees to fight these frivolous claims,” Mr. Raffensperger said in a statement. “Not every election official is going to be able to withstand that type of pressure,” he said. “This should send alarms to every election official across the country.”

The Hill: TikTok argues US overstates Chinese ties in legal fight over ban

By Julia Shapero

.....In a brief filed Thursday night, the popular social media app argued that despite its foreign ownership, TikTok is a U.S. company and enjoys First Amendment protections, comparing itself to foreign-owned American media companies. 

Politico: George Santos expected to plead guilty in federal fraud case

By Josh Gerstein

.....Former Rep. George Santos, who was expelled from the House last year amidst a fantastical flood of fraud allegations, is expected to offer guilty pleas Monday as part of a deal to resolve the wide-ranging federal indictment he faces, a person familiar with the case said.

Santos is set to appear Monday afternoon in federal court in eastern Long Island at what U.S. District Court Judge Joanna Seybert set as a pretrial hearing. However, there are plans to use the session to allow the former lawmaker to change his plea, according to the person who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive details of the case that are not yet public.

Washington Post: Federal court upholds block on California child online safety law

By Cristiano Lima-Strong

.....The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco ruled that the law’s requirement that tech companies inspect whether their products may harm children before rolling them out — a central part of one of the most significant such laws in the United States — probably violates the First Amendment.

Free Expression

Wall Street Journal: Liberal Thought Returns to Campus

By The Editorial Board

.....With all the dismaying news from college campuses lately, at least there’s one new bright spot for traditional liberal thought: The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill is opening the doors at its new school committed to free expression, after hiring 11 faculty, including seven tenure-line positions.

The School of Civic Life and Leadership will offer three courses this fall, including a primer on the American political tradition and a class on the fundamentals of civil debate. Students will be introduced to materials like the Federalist Papers, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and philosophical predecessors including Aristotle and Montesquieu. The goal is creating an environment where, as dean Jed Atkins puts it, “students can disagree better.”

New York Times: From ‘Perfect Candidate’ to Sudden Exit: Inside the Fall of Columbia’s President

By Alan BlinderStephanie SaulSharon Otterman and Mark Landler

.....In an open letter released on Wednesday night, Dr. Shafik, who goes by Minouche and could not be reached for comment, said ruefully that her 13-month tenure had included “a period of turmoil where it has been difficult to overcome divergent views across our community.” She cited the “considerable toll” on her family and said it had been “distressing — for the community, for me as president and on a personal level — to find myself, colleagues and students the subject of threats and abuse.”

Online Speech Platforms

Washington Post: X announces suspension of Brazil operations, alleging ‘censorship orders’ from Supreme Court justice

By Associated Press

.....Social media platform X said Saturday it will close its operations in Brazil , claiming Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes threatened to arrest its legal representative in Brazil if they did not comply with orders.

Candidates and Campaigns

Fox News: What is 'smurfing'? What every American needs to know about illegal money in elections

By Hans A. von Spakovsky 

.....Allegations have been raised by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Republican Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares (among others) that millions of dollars may be being funneled into candidate campaign coffers through a process known as "smurfing." We’re not talking about donations being made by small, blue comic-book characters—although we might as well be if the allegations are true.

What is campaign finance smurfing? It is a form of money laundering for campaign contributions. It involves breaking up large-scale donations in a way that disguises who the money is actually coming from, so the contribution limits on how much money can be donated to a particular candidate can be skirted. It may involve widespread mail and wire fraud and the fraudulent use of the identities of unwitting members of the public to violate federal and state campaign finance laws.

New York Times: The Democratic Party’s Money Machine

By Ravi MattuBernhard Warner and Lauren Hirsch

.....The Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010 was a jolt for fund-raising. That decision cleared the way for unlimited independent expenditures in political races by corporations and other groups, like labor unions, leading to the rise of super PACs and a flood of money.

The D.N.C. was forced to adapt. The new reality meant that billionaire donors had a new lever to pull in politics.

“The money is up everywhere,” Alvin Bernard Tillery Jr., a professor of political science at Northwestern, told DealBook. “It also means that the traditional committees don’t necessarily have control over everything like they did, say, 20 years ago.”

Some predicted that party fund-raising would die, said Matthew Foster, an expert on campaign finance at the School of Public Affairs at American University. Instead, the D.N.C. became a crucial magnet for small-dollar donations from individuals. “People would rather donate to a party than other obscure organizations,” he told DealBook.

The D.N.C. had a built-in advantage. The vaunted ground operation it designed to get out the votes has enabled it to tap into its existing network to connect with grass-roots Democrats. The biggest shift has been to layer digital infrastructure on top of this, with the emergence of new techniques for donating and fund-raising, like the tech platform ActBlue.

The States

Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): Are Laws Restricting Mask-Wearing in Public Constitutional?

By Eugene Volokh

.....Some places have recently enacted restrictions on wearing masks in public. They generally stem from three related rationales:

1. People's wearing masks makes it harder for the police to identify who committed some crime: trespass, vandalism, assault, and more. That's especially true when there are many people wearing the same masks, and a mask rock-thrower (for instance) can feel safe that it will be hard to identify him among the other mask-wearers.
2. Because of this, wearing masks can embolden would-be criminals.
3. And because of this, wearing masks can therefore be intimidating to bystanders, precisely because the bystanders will think that the mask-wearers might be willing to attack them with less risk of being caught and punished.

…

Here is the most recent such law I've seen, just enacted by Nassau County (N.Y.) (I think this is the version that was finally enacted), though other recent ones are quite similar:

WRAL: Complaint alleges social welfare group covertly bankrolled powerful NC lawmaker

By Laura Leslie

.....The petition against Greater Carolina Inc., Republican state Rep. Jason Saine and other GOP operatives was filed Thursday with the charitable solicitation division of the North Carolina Secretary of State’s office. It was filed by Blair Reeves, the executive director of Carolina Forward, a progressive nonprofit organization. A copy of the complaint, obtained Thursday by WRAL, alleges that Greater Carolina has been used to evade the state’s ban on gifts to public officials. It alleges that the organization provides a cover for ‘covert and unreported lobbying’ at luxury events that have benefited lawmakers, and that it raised and spent $1.5 million with no record of how or why it was spent. ‘Expenditures have been made by Greater Carolina to continue Rep. Saine’s exorbitant spending habits,’ the complaint said. ‘Petitioner further believes that Saine has also utilized the resources of Greater Carolina not merely for his own benefit but for the benefit of those lobbyists and legislators, as well as legislative staffers, whose interests he has chosen to advance.’ Those activities aren’t allowed because of the group’s tax status, the complaint said.

Texas Tribune: Texas AG Ken Paxton sues Houston immigrants’ rights org over political speech

By Alejandro Serrano

.....Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s latest lawsuit against an immigrants’ rights organization claims the Houston group violated federal rules that govern nonprofits’ political involvement by criticizing former President Donald Trump, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and a new state immigration law.

Paxton sued FIEL — a Spanish acronym for Familias Inmigrantes y Estudiantes en la Lucha, which translates to Immigrant Families and Students in the Fight — a month ago in the 127th Harris County District Court and asked a judge to dissolve the organization. The immigrant-run group, founded in 2007, offers education, social and legal services to immigrant families in the region.

The lawsuit, first reported Friday by the Houston Chronicle, is the latest effort from Paxton’s office to shut down entities that help migrants by accusing those groups in state courts of human smuggling; judges have so far rejected those claims.

However the state’s lawsuit against FIEL appears to be the first to target a group far from the border and the first to target what is essentially political speech.