September 19, 2025

In the News

The State: GOP group takes swing at Graham’s challengers in U.S. Senate race. Why?

By Lucy Valeski

.....A Republican party committee wants two GOP U.S. Senate candidates investigated for allegedly failing to comply with a minor campaign finance law. It’s an effort some election law experts argue is intended to keep incumbents in power…

“What you see going on here is the national party committees … all of them tend to just support their incumbents,” said Brad Smith, the chairman of the Institute for Free Speech. Smith is a former Federal Election Commission chairman, and he founded the Institute for Free Speech, a nonprofit that often criticizes campaign spending restrictions. A campaign official for Dans’ said that the law at hand does not require a personal finance disclosure report until 2026, which Smith said is not the typical interpretation of the rules.

Washington Examiner: Bondi faces fresh conservative backlash over ‘hate speech’ comments

By Naomi Lim

.....“I would fire her for this or I'd give her a few hours to fix it and then go take a remedial course in the First Amendment,” David Keating, the president of the Institute for Free Speech, told the Washington Examiner.

“I'm speechless that the chief law enforcement officer of the United States would get the First Amendment so badly wrong,” Keating added. “I understand her anger, but I don't excuse this kind of statement.”

Via MSN

The Badger Project: Dem legislators reintroduce bill to protect free speech rights from frivolous lawsuits

By Annie Pulley

.....More than 60% of the U.S. population lives in a state that provides “good” protection from SLAPP cases, according to a 2025 report from the Institute for Free Speech, a Washington-based nonprofit dedicated to the First Amendment.

But if you live in Wisconsin, you’re not among that protected majority. 

Thirty-eight states and Washington have “a functioning anti-SLAPP statute,” says the report, which ranked states from A to F based on the strength of their anti-SLAPP protections. Wisconsin is among 12 states, including Michigan, that do not provide any anti-SLAPP protections. Minnesota and Iowa have A ratings.

Supreme Court

Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): David Cole Said It Would Be Like This: The ACLU's Smart Move in Representing the NRA in NRA v. Vullo

By Eugene Volokh

.....Back in 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear NRA v. Vullo, where the National Rifle Association alleged that New York government officials violated the First Amendment by pressuring financial intermediaries to cut off or reduce their business ties to the NRA. At that point, the ACLU and its then-National Legal Director David Cole agreed to represent the NRA before the Supreme Court; indeed, Cole argued the case (extremely effectively, I thought).

This decision was controversial within the ACLU; indeed, the New York affiliate of the ACLU (the NYCLU) put out a public statement "strongly disagree[ing]" with the ACLU's decision to represent the NRA. The ACLU of New Mexico likewise dissented. But the ACLU leadership went ahead with the representation, presenting what I thought was a powerful Left-Right coalition before the Court.

And I take it that the ACLU's rationale wasn't just that the NRA deserved to have its rights vindicated; I assume that they also recognized that what New York was doing to a conservative speaker, conservative states (or a conservative federal government) could do to liberal speakers...

Boy, the ACLU sure called that one. NRA v. Vullo is now a staple of arguments against similarly coercive actions by the Trump Administration. It's being talked about now with regard to the Kimmel show suspension, but it has also been relied on by courts in a challenge to the cancellation of federal grants to Harvard, a challenge to the Department of Education's actions related to DEI programs, challenges to the sanctions imposed by the Administration on various law firms, and more. And of course conservative speakers will be able to take advantage of it as well in future cases, too.

Bloomberg Law: Sotomayor Laments Lawyers Who Want to ‘Criminalize Free Speech’

By Mike Vilensky

.....US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said whenever she hears a “lawyer-trained representative say we should criminalize free speech in some way, I think to myself, that law school has failed.”

“If any student who becomes a lawyer hasn’t been taught civics, then that law school has failed,” Sotomayor said Tuesday at New York Law School. “Because it is for that system that you’re working as a lawyer.”

The remarks, part of a wide-ranging conversation at the school’s “Constitution & Citizenship Day Summit,” come amid broader concerns about the state of free expression. Sotomayor didn’t specify which representatives she was referring to, but her remarks came one day after US Attorney General Pam Bondi said on the “Katie Miller Podcast” that law enforcement would “target” people who are “targeting anyone with hate speech, across the aisle.”

Congress

Congresswoman Ramirez: Congresswoman Ramirez Introduces [Stupid] Campaign Finance Reform Legislative Package

.....Today, Congresswoman Delia C. Ramirez (IL-03), co-chair of the Strengthening Democracy Task Force and a Common Cause alumna, introduced two landmark pieces of legislation to protect our democracy from money in politics. The Campaign Transparency Act and the Stop the Super PAC-Candidate Coordination Act, co-led by Congresswoman Summer Lee (PA-12), ensure greater transparency as it relates to contributions in federal elections…

The Campaign Transparency Act would eliminate the contribution amount threshold to report the identity of a person who donates to political committees for federal elections. Currently, a person who contributes $200 or less per calendar year (or election cycle for authorized candidate committees) does not have to be identified by the committee in certain required reports. The legislation is cosponsored by Rep. Mullin (CA-15) and Rep. McCollum (MN-04). The legislation is endorsed by End Citizens United…

For the full text of the Campaign Transparency Act, CLICK HERE.

For the full text of the Stop the Super PAC-Candidate Coordination Act, CLICK HERE.

Free Expression

Wall Street Journal: Inside Disney’s Abrupt Decision to Suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s Show

By Joe Flint, Suzanne Vranica, and Isabella Simonetti

.....After ABC pulled Kimmel’s show, Carr said in a post on X on Wednesday night that “local broadcasters have an obligation to serve the public interest” and praised Nexstar for “doing the right thing.” He also praised Sinclair in a separate post.

President Trump said Thursday while speaking to reporters on Air Force One that broadcast networks that are “against” him might have their licenses taken away. “They give me only bad press, but they’re getting a license,” he said.

New York Times: The Dangers of the Charlie Kirk Aftermath

By David French

.....Rather than rebuking Bondi, [President Trump] turned up the volume, telling ABC’s Jonathan Karl that Bondi would “probably go after people like you” because “you have a lot of hate in your heart.” He also bragged that he’d collected a $16 million settlement from ABC “for a form of hate speech.”

He said these words hours after filing a $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times, as part of an obvious (and fruitless) effort to intimidate The Times into shifting its coverage to please him.

At the same time, Vice President JD Vance encouraged Americans to report their fellow citizens to their employers if they celebrated Kirk’s death online. “Call them out, and hell, call their employer,” he said, and then added, laughably, “We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.”

New York Times: Atlantic Settles Writer’s Suit Over Article It Retracted

By Katie Robertson

.....The Atlantic quietly agreed to pay more than $1 million early this summer to settle a lawsuit by the writer Ruth Shalit Barrett, who had accused the magazine of defamation after it took the rare step of retracting an article she had written and replacing it with an editor’s note, according to a person with knowledge of the settlement.

Ms. Barrett, who wrote an article about youth sports in wealthy areas as a freelancer for The Atlantic in 2020, sued the publication and one of its editors in January 2022. She said the outlet had smeared her reputation and asked for $1 million in damages.

Nonprofits, Independent Groups and other Organizations

Election Law Blog: “A New Democratic Think Tank Wants to Curb the Influence of Liberal Groups”

By Ned Foley

.....I was curious about how the new entity, called Searchlight Institute, is being organized for campaign finance and tax purposes, but the article does not address that. It evidently has a specifically electoral purpose, not just a generically political one, but much of its expenditures probably could be avoid being classified as electioneering. For those thinking about campaign finance regulation ought to be conducted in a post-Citizens United world (if ever that were to transpire), what would be the appropriate way to treat an organization of this nature? Purely disclosure rules? Contribution or spending limits? Or outside the scope of campaign finance regulation altogether, because its activities are more properly understood as not specifically election-related despite its electoral purpose–and thus should be treated as the equivalent of Brookings, AEI, and other think tanks?

The Verve: Meta created its own super PAC to politically kneecap its AI rivals

By Hayden Field and Tina Nguyen

.....“It’s essentially a way for [Zuckerberg] to spend the company’s money on his political choices, whereas at a company like Google, there’s not a single person who’s a majority shareholder who can dictate what the company does,” Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor specializing in election law, told The Verge. “It’s interesting, because Zuckerberg could just spend his own personal money to do this. But instead, he’s doing it through the company.”

The States

People United for Privacy: Addressing Political Violence in America: Practical Solutions We Can Act on Now

.....Our work to make America safe for free speech includes:

• The Personal Privacy Protection Act (PPPA). Our signature model policy has been adopted in 22 states covering over 100 million Americans. The PPPA ensures citizens can join, volunteer for, and donate to nonprofit causes they believe in without their personal information being exposed to biased bureaucrats or unhinged extremists. The PPPA prohibits government agencies from collecting and disclosing such sensitive information.
• Modernizing State Campaign Finance and Lobbying Laws for the Digital Age. State laws governing the collection and publication of information about Americans involved in the political process often predate today’s hyperconnected world and fail to protect against the risk of political violence. We help states clean up their antiquated laws, remove unconstitutional statutes, and ensure citizens are not unnecessarily put at risk for exercising core First Amendment rights.
• Home Address Redaction Policy. Under current federal campaign finance laws, Americans who give as little as $200 to a candidate, political party, or political committee must have their name, home address, occupation, and employer published in a public and searchable online database. Many state laws set an even lower threshold for these invasive disclosures. Exposing donors’ home street addresses puts Americans at risk of targeting, harassment, and violence while doing nothing to prevent corruption. We encourage Congress and the states to raise donor disclosure thresholds and pass redaction policies that ensure public transparency objectives are met while shielding donors’ street names and numbers and their employers from exposure.

The Texas Tribune: Ken Paxton’s legal crusade against Beto O’Rourke is faltering before an all-Republican appeals court

By Eleanor Klibanoff

.....In early August, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed an explosive lawsuit, accusing Beto O’Rourke of bribery, fraud and campaign finance violations for supporting Texas Democrats who left the state to protest new GOP congressional maps.

Six weeks, four courts, two counties, dueling rulings and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses later, Paxton’s case against the former El Paso congressman seems on the brink of collapse.

Last week, the all-Republican 15th Court of Appeals undid the temporary restraining order that prevented O’Rourke and his organization from fundraising and distributing donations, ruling it an unconstitutional violation of free speech protections.

While acknowledging the case raises "unusual questions" about whether political funds can be used to help lawmakers leave the state, the court said it is an improper chilling of free speech to preemptively block an organization from spending its money.

“[T]he question today is not whether such activities can be punished after the fact … but whether they can be prohibited before they occur based on a suspicion that they might,” the justices wrote in their unanimous ruling. “At this stage, where little evidence has been offered, the latter would constitute an unconstitutional prior restraint of political activity that may or may not prove to be lawful.”

The court still has to rule on the rest of the appeal, but in Friday’s opinion, they cast doubt on some of Paxton’s central arguments. Paxton condemned the ruling as a constitutional crisis, slamming the court’s “activist judges,” along with the all-GOP Texas Supreme Court for declining to step in.