November 6, 2024

In the News

The Sheridan Press: The public comments on school district's approach to public comment

By Hector Martinez

.....Five Sheridan County residents waited two hours and 58 minutes to voice their opinions to the Sheridan County School District 2 Board Trustees during public comment Monday.

Each person has three minutes to speak on the podium. Policy BEDH — Participation at Board Meetings — states, “At times, it shall set a time limit on the length of this period or a time limit for individual speakers.”

Shelley Pollak was the first to speak, where she recalled a board meeting in February 2022 where her husband Harry Pollak was silenced and interrupted by former board chair Susan Wilson after he tried to address comments from SCSD2 Superintendent Scott Stults from a previous meeting and was later escorted out of the building by Sheridan Police Department officers.

“I have witnessed some members of this board and Superintendent Stults repeatedly violate speakers and parents’ rights, including mine. You claim you want to hear what people have to say, but some of you have continually silenced us because you don’t like what we say, and you either don’t understand or you don’t respect the U.S. and Wyoming Constitutions and the oath you swore to uphold,” Shelley Pollak said.

U.S. District Court of Wyoming entered a final judgment on a 2022 case between Harry Pollak and SCSD2 and Wilson. The court found the interpretation of the policy to exclude all speakers who mention individual employees to be unreasonable and unconstitutional, and ruled in favor of SCSD2 in Pollak’s claim against the district’s Offensive Speech policy, according to previous Sheridan Press reporting.

As Harry Pollak walked up to speak, he hung up a T-shirt that said, “I do not co-parent with the government or the school board,” on the podium.

Supreme Court

SCOTUSblog (Petitions of the Week): Anti-abortion activists ask justices to overrule ban on expressive activity outside clinics

By Kalvis Golde

.....In contrast to the unruly anti-abortion demonstrations that inspired the Englewood law, both Turco and the members of Coalition Life describe their efforts as “sidewalk counseling,” a practice focused on individual, one-on-one conversation, rather than large-scale picketing or protest.

Federal district courts ultimately rebuffed the challenges to both cities’ ordinances. And the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 3rd and 7th Circuits — which cover New Jersey and Illinois, respectively — affirmed those rulings.

In Turco v. City of Englewood, New Jersey, and Coalition Life v. City of Carbondale, Illinois, Turco and Coalition Life ask the justices to overrule their prior decision in Hill. Characterizing that ruling as a dead letter, they emphasize the court’s repeated efforts to cabin Hill since it was issued over 20 years ago – including both a 2014 decision striking down a Massachusetts law that created 35-foot buffer zones outside medical facilities, and the passage in Dobbs that called Hill into question. The time has come, the challengers argue, for the justices to jettison Hill and make clear that ordinances like those in Englewood and Carbondale are unconstitutional.

The Courts

Wall Street Journal: California Emissions Disclosure Requirements Survive Legal Challenge

By Richard Vanderford and H. Claire Brown

.....A California judge is allowing the state’s landmark carbon emissions disclosure requirements to move forward as planned—for now. 

U.S. District Judge Otis Wright II said Tuesday that he needs more information before he can decide whether the expansive reporting regime California intends to put in place violates businesses’ First Amendment rights against compelled speech.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other trade groups sued the state of California earlier this year in Los Angeles federal court aiming to overturn two laws that will require large businesses to disclose detailed information on their carbon emissions and climate-related risks...

The judge said he might still decide to throw out the climate disclosure requirements on First Amendment grounds but that he wants more information on how they might work in practice. His ruling will allow discovery to take place on the First Amendment questions.

Sacramento Bee: Elections supervisor fired for comments on Jon Stewart’s TV show, lawsuit in Denver says

By Julia Marnin

.....A former Denver elections supervisor was fired in retaliation for voicing concerns about threats to poll workers and their safety while appearing on a TV show hosted by Jon Stewart in 2022, according to a new federal lawsuit. Virginia Chau, a corporate attorney, took time off from her full-time job when she worked eight different elections as a voting service polling center supervisor in Denver from 2018 through 2022, a complaint says.

Southwest Contemporary: Former Curator of Mesa Art Museum Files Federal Lawsuit Alleging Censorship and Discrimination

By Lynn Trimble

.....Tiffany Fairall, former chief curator for the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum in Arizona, has filed a lawsuit against the City of Mesa in the aftermath of 2023 censorship allegations related to artwork by street artist, graphic designer, and activist Shepard Fairey.

The lawsuit accuses the City of Mesa…of violating Fairall’s First Amendment rights to free speech.

The filing alleges additional violations of federal law, making it clear that the Shepard Fairey controversy reflects just a small part of Fairall’s concerns about the city’s policies and practices related to artists, curators, and the city-run museum located at Mesa Arts Center…

[H]er allegations are outlined in a twenty-five-page complaint that her attorneys filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona on October 31, 2024. Previously, she’d filed charges of discrimination with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Independent Groups

OpenSecrets: Outside spending on 2024 elections shatters records, fueled by billion-dollar ‘dark money’ infusion

By Anna Massoglia

.....Outside spending on 2024 federal elections has hit a record $4.5 billion, with more than half of that spending coming from groups that do not fully disclose the source of their funding. 

Independent political committees like super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited sums but must disclose their donors to the Federal Election Commission, have reported receiving over $1 billion from shell companies and “dark money” groups like nonprofits that do not — and are not required to — disclose their donors. 

During the 2022 midterm cycle, OpenSecrets documented $617 million in contributions from groups with anonymous donors while the last presidential cycle attracted $653 million. That represents a substantial jump from the 2016 election when shell companies and dark money groups contributed less than $71.7 million to federal political committees. 

Outside spending on the 2024 presidential race pitting Vice President Kamala Harris against former President Donald Trump has soared to a historic high of over $2 billion — marking the most expensive U.S. election in history, even when adjusted for inflation. Prior to this year, the most expensive election in U.S. history was the 2020 presidential race when about $1.14 billion was spent by outside groups. 

Online Speech Platforms

Washington Post (Tech Brief): What Trump’s win means for Silicon Valley

By Cristiano Lima-Strong

.....For the first time in history, a sitting president will own his own social media site, Truth Social, and be tightly allied with another, Musk’s X.

That dynamic could give Trump an unparalleled megaphone as he returns to office and could push new boundaries in Washington’s battles over content moderation.

Trump’s tenuous relationship with the head of another major social network, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, will also be tested. While Trump wrote in a recent book that Zuckerberg could spend “the rest of his life in prison” if he meddled in the 2024 elections, he said he likes him “much better now” after the company sought to minimize its footprint in politics this cycle.

The States

Maine Morning Star:  Election 2024 Mainers vote to reform campaign finance, open path for Supreme Court to weigh in

By Emma Davis

.....Mainers voted on Tuesday to place limits on donations to political action committees that independently spend money to try to support or defeat candidates — teeing up a path to get the U.S. Supreme Court to reassess some campaign finance regulations. 

The citizen referendum, which received 74% of voter support with 62% of votes counted as of 2:20 a.m. Wednesday, asked, “Do you want to set a $5,000 limit for giving to political action committees that spend money independently to support or defeat candidates for office?”

The ultimate goal of those behind the question, however, is to get the high court to rule that PACs should be regulated. 

Signature gathering for the referendum first started around the November election last year, as the latest effort from legal scholar Lawrence Lessig to address a core flaw he and other scholars believe a lower court overlooked when establishing super PACs 14 years ago.

Since Buckley v. Valeo in 1976, the Supreme Court has allowed contributions to be regulated when there is a risk of “quid pro quo” corruption, essentially a favor for a favor. In the case of elections, if there is a risk someone could be making a donation to a candidate in exchange for a favor, only then can Congress regulate that contribution. In 2010, the Supreme Court extended this reasoning to corporations and unions in Citizens United v. Federal Election Campaign Act. 

Three months later, in SpeechNow.org v. FEC, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld that contributions to groups making independent expenditures can’t corrupt or create the appearance of corruption. That decision essentially created the “super PAC,” which can receive unlimited contributions but can’t contribute directly to candidates. Other lower federal and state courts followed suit, and the ruling was never reviewed by the Supreme Court. 

Lessig previously told Maine Morning Star he thinks there is no chance the Supreme Court will change Citizens United but that the question the Maine referendum raises is not answered in Citizens United — whether contributions to a committee that makes independent expenditures can be limited.

Ed. note: Read IFS President and SpeechNow.org plaintiff David Keating's op-ed urging Maine voters to reject the measure here (originally published in the Portland Press Herald).