November 14, 2024

Congress

Senator Mitch McConnell: McConnell Receives AEI’s Irving Kristol Award

.....“I realized from a fairly junior perch in the Senate that the power to block bad ideas is every bit as potent as the power to advance good ones. And by design, this power gets considerably greater use in the defense of institutions.

“The first major way I got to put this recognition in practice was in the debate over campaign finance.

“The institution of the First Amendment is built on the idea that political speech deserves explicit protection. And it was as clear to me in the early 1990s as it is today that if you want to defend this explicit good, you need to protect the implicit avenues for exercising the right to political speech.

“Of course, if you buy this premise, it’s likely to take you to politically uncomfortable places. The same reason I so strongly opposed federal restrictions on political speech in campaign finance also led me to oppose a Constitutional amendment banning flag-burning.

“Needless to say, I don’t mind taking my lumps for unpopular positions, and that one was about as unpopular as they come! But hopefully, it demonstrates that we don’t get to tamper with the ideas underpinning our core institutions without risking the institutions, themselves..

New York Post: FBI used ‘software tools’ to search social media for election-related talk: analyst

By Steven Nelson

.....House Republicans are demanding more information from the FBI about its use of “software tools” to seek out election-related speech on social media after a bureau analyst mentioned their use during a recent deposition — before being barred from saying any more by FBI lawyers.

House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told FBI Director Christopher Wray Tuesday to hand over the information as President-elect Donald Trump’s looming return to office creates uncertainty for Wray’s future employment.

“In a transcribed interview… on October 23, 2024, an FBI Criminal Investigative Division Analyst previously assigned to the [Foreign Influence Task Force] disclosed that the FITF uses ‘software tools where [the FBI can] search open-source databases about content indicative of criminal conduct’,” Jordan wrote to Wray in a letter obtained by The Post.

Although the material was described as “open-source,” the search tools are suspected to have been developed in-house.

It’s unclear what social media sites are included in the search or how the information is compiled.

ACLU: ACLU Cheers House Vote Blocking H.R. 9495

By Michelle Del Rey

.....The House of Representatives blocked H.R. 9495, the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, 256-145. Because the House of Representatives was attempting to move the bill on suspension it required a two-thirds majority in order to pass. This legislation would have granted the Secretary of Treasury the unilateral power to investigate and effectively shut down any tax-exempt organization — including news outlets, universities, and civil society groups — by stripping them of their tax-exempt status based on an unilateral accusation of wrongdoing.

Last month, the ACLU and a diverse array of over 130 other tax-exempt organizations — including human rights, reproductive health, and immigrants’ rights groups — wrote to Congress urging them to vote no.

The Courts

OutKick: Volleyball Players Sue Mountain West Alleging First Amendment Violations Tied To Transgender SJSU Player

By Dan Zaksheske

.....A dozen women have filed a lawsuit against the Mountain West Conference and its commissioner, along with officials at San Jose State University. They allege violations of Title IX and of their First Amendment rights, all stemming from the presence of transgender player Blaire Fleming on the San Jose State roster, OutKick has learned.

The plaintiffs, which include San Jose State co-captain Brooke Slusser and two former Spartans, as well as athletes from four other Mountain West schools, allege the conference adopted a new "Transgender Participation Policy" in an attempt to "chill and suppress the free speech rights of women athletes."

Ed. note: The complaint is embedded at the bottom of the article.

Washington Post (Tech Brief): Trump’s win turns online censorship case upside-down

By Will Oremus

.....A district judge on Friday allowed the case known as Missouri v. Biden to resume even as the Biden administration winds down. The Supreme Court vacated his previous ruling in the case in June, but the new one means the plaintiffs can now pursue additional discovery.

That sets the stage for Donald Trump and his team to inherit the role of defendants in government censorship cases brought by some of their own political allies — including Robert F. Kennedy Jr....

In a seven-page order, Doughty opted to allow the plaintiffs to proceed, albeit “burdened by what has been” — a winking reference to a Kamala Harris quote that became a meme during the campaign.

The ruling came despite what Doughty called “the unignorable reality that regime change is imminent” in Washington.

Trump Administration

Washington Post: Trump expected to try to halt TikTok ban, allies say

By Jeff Stein, Drew Harwell and Jacob Bogage

.....President-elect Donald Trump is expected to try to halt a potential U.S. ban of TikTok next year, after he promised on the campaign trail to save the popular social media app if he won, according to people familiar with his views on the matter.

Wall Street Journal: State Department Division That Battles Foreign Disinformation Faces Closure

By Michael R. Gordon and Dustin Volz

.....A State Department office that uses high-level U.S. intelligence to combat Russian and Chinese information operations abroad faces a possible shutdown at the end of the year, just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House.

Its fate is seen as an early sign of the willingness of the second Trump administration and its congressional allies to push back against foreign disinformation plots, which intelligence officials say went into hyperdrive during the 2024 election season, powered in part by artificial intelligence.

The office, known as the Global Engagement Center, has vocal backers including retired Army Gen. Paul Nakasone, the former head of the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command, who says it has been an important tool for stymieing foreign disinformation directed at overseas audiences. But its most acerbic critics include Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X who backed Trump during the election and is now expected to head a commission that would recommend ways to cut government bureaucracy and spending.

Musk alleged last year the center has sought to shape social-media content.

House Republicans also have trained their sights on the center, accusing it of funding organizations that have meddled in domestic politics. The center has more support in the Senate, where a bipartisan push is under way to extend it with strict controls on how it spends its funds.

Free Expression

Nonprofit Law Prof Blog: Ted Olson, Citizens United v. FEC

By Darryll K. Jones

.....From yesterday's Washington Post Obituary: ...

In 2010, Theodore Olson became a lead attorney in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a landmark case that concerned election spending and freedom of speech and challenged federal campaign finance restrictions he had defended as solicitor general. Mr. Olson represented Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit group that had produced a documentary film that presented a scathing assessment of Hillary Clinton as she sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. The group wanted to pay cable TV companies to make the documentary available to viewers at no charge and sought relief from federal restrictions on corporate electioneering. “If dancing nude and burning the flag are protected by the First Amendment, why would it not protect robust speech about the people who are running for office?” Mr. Olson remarked to the Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Olson helped persuade the court to strike down, in a 5-to-4 ruling, portions of the campaign finance law that restricted corporate and union spending on political advertising close to an election. The decision allowed corporations and other groups to spend unlimited funds on political campaigns. However, the court rejected Citizens United’s attempt to have the film about Clinton (and ads for it) exempted from federal disclaimer and disclosure requirements.

Online Speech Platforms

Washington Post: Liberals are fleeing X again — this time for Bluesky

By Will Oremus

.....Elon Musk’s X drew more web traffic on the day Donald Trump won the presidential election than on any other day so far this year, the analytics firm Similarweb estimates. It also broke its 2024 record for users lost in a single day.

With Musk taking on a central advisory role to Trump’s administration after leveraging X and his personal fortune to boost Trump’s campaign, U.S. liberals and others disenchanted with the site are once again scurrying to friendlier pastures. This time, though, the primary beneficiary may not be Meta’s Threads, which is controlled by Musk’s fellow billionaire Mark Zuckerberg and has acquired 275 million users in just over a year, many of them X refugees.

Instead, the upstart social network Bluesky is surging. It has more than doubled in size in the past three months. And in the eight days since the election, it has added more than 1.25 million users, bringing its total to more than 15 million as it topped Apple’s App Store rankings on Wednesday. Of those, some 8.5 million have logged in within the past month, spokesperson Emily Liu said Wednesday.

The States

The City: Eric Adams Reaped Public Dollars From a So-Called Small-Donor Barbecue. Video Shows a Lavish Long Island Soiree Instead

By George Joseph, Alyssa Katz, Yoav Gonen and Katie Honan

.....In a campaign that pulled in more than $10 million in public matching dollars from the taxpayers of New York City, the August 2021 fundraiser on Long Island for then-mayoral nominee Eric Adams was a standout.

It booked 231 donations, many of them from supermarket cashiers, delivery people and other low wage workers at the New World Mall in Queens, each listed as having made contributions of $249 or $250.

Their contributions were worth far more thanks to the matching funds program, which was designed to root out the influence of big money in elections by matching the first $250 of contributions from New York City residents eight times over with public funds. The campaign sought $362,000 in matching funds on the basis of the $55,000 it raised, entirely in small donations.

But a video recently discovered on YouTube and reviewed by THE CITY and The Guardian reveals an event, hosted by New World Mall president Lian Wu Shao and his family at their Long Island mansion, that doesn’t appear to have been a grassroots fundraiser. (The video disappeared from YouTube following this article’s publication, replaced with a note: “This video has been removed by the uploader.”)