December 16, 2024

In the News

Washington Post: Maine's voter-approved limit on PAC contributions triggers lawsuit in federal court

By David Sharp, AP

.....A pair of conservative groups on Friday challenged a Maine law that limits donations to political action committees that spend independently in candidate elections, arguing that money spent to support political expression is “a vital feature of our democracy.”

Supporters of the referendum overwhelmingly approved on Election Day fully expected a legal showdown over caps on individual contributions to so-called super PACs. They hoped the referendum would trigger a case and ultimately prompt the U.S. Supreme Court to clarify the matter of donor limits after the court opened the floodgates to independent spending in its 2010 Citizens United decision.

The lawsuit brought by Dinner Table Action and For Our Future, and supported by the Institute for Free Speech, contends the state law limiting individual super PAC donations to $5,000 and requiring disclosure of donor names runs afoul of that Citizens United legal precedent.

“All Americans, not just those running for office, have a fundamental First Amendment right to talk about political campaigns,” lawyers wrote in the lawsuit in federal court. “Their ‘independent expenditures,’ payments that fund political expression by those who are not running for office but nonetheless have something to say about a campaign, are a vital feature of our democracy.”

Supreme Court

ACLU: Can you define pornography? Neither can the government.

.....For years the government has tried to censor or burden access to sexual content in an attempt to block minors from accessing so-called explicit content. At the ACLU, we know that these efforts unlawfully burden adult access to sexual materials and do not actually keep kids safe. That’s why we’re headed back to the Supreme Court to challenge a Texas law that burdens access to sexual material in the name of protecting kids.

In FSC v. Paxton, we and the law firm Quinn Emanuel are challenging a Texas law that forces people to share personally identifying information — potentially including a picture of themselves, biometric scans, or their government ID — before they can access websites that host some amount of sexual content.

The Courts

The Hill: Federal appeals court blocks push to delay January TikTok ban

By Juliann Ventura 

.....A federal appeals court in Washington denied a request from the social platform TikTok that would effectively delay the ban of the app next month.

The rejection comes after the company sought to stop the ban Monday, asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to temporarily block the law that could ban the app next month from going into effect Jan. 19 as it prepares to appeal to the Supreme Court...

On Friday, TikTok seemed hopeful in turning to the Supreme Court, saying in a statement Friday the court has “an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue.”

FEC

FEC Weekly Digest: Week of December 9 – 13, 2024

.....REG 2024-06 (Requests to Modify or Redact Contributor Information): Draft Notice of Proposed Rulemaking On December 12, the Commission approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking seeking public comment on proposed procedures for contributors or their agents to request the Commission — in certain limited circumstances when there is a reasonable probability the contributor may face threat, harassment or reprisal — to modify or redact, in whole or in part, certain contributor information from a disclosure report or statement that has been filed with the Commission. The Commission seeks comments on the Notice, which will be published in the Federal Register with a deadline for submitting comments.

Biden Administration

Fox News: Biden Education Department spent over $1 billion on DEI grants: report

By Kristine Parks 

.....The U.S. Department of Education spent at least $1 billion on grants advancing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in hiring, programming and mental health training in America's schools since 2021, according to a new report.

Parents Defending Education "PDE", a right-leaning organization that pledges to "reclaim our schools from activists imposing harmful agendas," shared its new report exclusively with Fox News Digital.

Researchers at the organization pored through nearly four years of publicly available data from the Department of Education to determine the number of grants and the dollar amount awarded to students and school districts for grants that had a clear DEI "motive."

Free Expression

Inside Higher Ed: Republicans Host Campus Free Speech Roundtable

By Jessica Blake

.....Seeking a safe space to express her views, Jordan quickly joined her campus chapter of the conservative student organization. But as she rose in the ranks from local secretary to YAF national chairwoman, she realized that on college campuses, “conservative values did not get the same playing field as more left-leaning ones.”

“As soon as I joined the organization, I was attacked by Black students because they felt like I couldn’t be Black and a woman and a conservative at the same time,” Jordan, now a senior, told Inside Higher Ed. “They were calling me a white supremacist, a token, a bigot. And that really opened my eyes to see how conservatives are attacked simply for expressing their constitutional rights.”

This kind of “doxxing,” as Jordan described it, was what led her to speak about the climate of campus free speech before a group of congressional Republicans Wednesday…

The roundtable discussion, hosted by North Carolina representative Gregory Murphy, reinforced the GOP’s argument that colleges and universities across the country have become liberal bastions that do not welcome intellectual diversity.

Independent Groups

The Hill: Opaque nonprofit donation to shadowy super PAC raises ‘several red flags’

By Taylor Giorno

.....A $1.6 million donation, the super PAC’s sole source of funding, from a newly formed Delaware-based nonprofit called Stop China Now Inc. was not disclosed until after Election Day. The donation came one day after books closed on the final campaign finance disclosure before the Nov. 5 general election.

Save Western Culture and Stop China Now share an address — a UPS box in Greenfield, Mass. Someone named Seth Martin is listed as both the super PAC treasurer and nonprofit incorporator, according to new business records obtained by The Hill.

The arrangement raises “several red flags justifying further investigation,” said Lee Goodman, a former Republican chair on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) who is now a partner at the legal giant Wiley.

“Under well established FEC rules, if a person or organization funnels money through an organization like Stop China Now for the purpose of funding a contribution to a Super PAC and avoiding disclosure of the original source of the funds, then the structured contribution constitutes making a contribution in the name of another person. That’s a serious violation that can carry both civil and potentially criminal penalties,” Goodman wrote in an email to The Hill.

Candidates and Campaigns

Wall Street Journal: Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Donates $1 Million to Trump’s Inaugural Fund

By Dana Mattioli and Rebecca Ballhaus

.....Meta Platforms has donated $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural fund, the latest step by Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg to bolster his once-fraught relationship with the incoming president.

The donation, confirmed by the company, is a departure from past practice by Zuckerberg and his company, and comes after an election campaign in which Trump threatened to punish the tech tycoon if he tried to influence the election against him.

The States

Albany Times Union: GOP accuses Democrats of rigging NY public campaign finance system

By Brendan J. Lyons

.....State Republican lawmakers are accusing Democrats on the Public Campaign Finance Board of ramming through a resolution this week that changed the rules governing campaign funds to retroactively benefit multiple Democratic candidates who had transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee.

Republicans contend the resolution had not been on the board’s agenda on Monday. The four Democrats on the board voted against a motion by Peter S. Kosinski, who sits on the board and is also a Republican state Board of Elections commissioner, to table the resolution. The Democrats on the board then approved the resolution that allows transfers using non-public matching funds to be included in a surplus calculation for the total campaign expenditures.

The rule change, which Republicans allege was done to retroactively authorize the Democratic candidates' large campaign transfers, had essentially allowed more than $2 million in campaign funds to be move to political committees even if some of those funds were from a new taxpayer-funded campaign program that was intended to help grassroots candidates wage viable campaigns. 

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Should Georgia hide state lawmakers’ addresses to protect their safety?

By Greg Bluestein, Tia Mitchell, Patricia Murphy and Adam Beam

.....“I know where you live” is a frightening threat, especially for state lawmakers whose personal addresses are just a few clicks away on the State Ethics Commission’s website.

That could change next year. David Emadi, executive director of the State Ethics Commission, said he plans to push for legislation that would redact lawmakers’ personal addresses from their campaign finance disclosures.

Rocket Miner: Rock Springs court set to hear Wyoming Freedom Caucus defamation case

By Maggie Mullen, WyoFile.com Via Wyoming News Exchange

.....A Sweetwater County district court judge will hear arguments Jan. 31 in the defamation case brought by two lawmakers against a political action committee affiliated with the Wyoming Freedom Caucus.

Rock Springs Reps. J.T. Larson and Cody Wylie sued WY Freedom PAC in July for sending text messages and mailers to potential voters claiming that the lawmakers had voted “with the RADICAL LEFT to remove President Trump from the ballot.” No such vote has ever been held by the Wyoming Legislature.

The two Republican legislators allege that the PAC knew its statements were false, and therefore made them with actual malice — a legal standard in defamation cases involving public figures or officials.

“If it was critical of my voting record, that would have been fine. I wouldn’t have said a word,” Wylie previously told WyoFile. “But this is just blatantly creating lies to try to affect the election cycle.”

The Tennessean:  Protesting in a chicken mask? Tennessee man fends off lawsuit in free speech win

By Angele Latham

.....In a win for free expression in Tennessee, a Smyrna man prevailed Monday against a defamation lawsuit filed against him after he protested a local business on a public sidewalk while wearing a chicken-head mask.

Judge Jo Atwood in the Circuit Court for Rutherford County dismissed the lawsuit against Daylyn Langford of Smyrna, filed against him by Jonathan Gilbert, owner of Jon’s Auto Service in Smyrna. The judge sided with Langford's argument that the lawsuit was a SLAPP suit, or a “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.”