This is the Daily Media Update published by the Institute for Free Speech. For press inquiries, please contact Luke Wachob at [email protected].
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In the News
By Ian Brenson
.....Against the backdrop of partisanship, the testimony of Gary Lawkowski stood out. Mr. Lawkowski, a Senior Fellow with the Institute for Free Speech and Counsel with the Dhillon Law Group, looked at the bigger picture and emphasized that the real problem is determining "who decides what is disinformation?" The solution to disinformation is more information. The more information is in the public domain, the more the American people can make an educated decision on what to believe. Mr. Lawkowski stated in his testimony:
"When thinking about regulating 'disinformation,' it is important to remember that political fortunes rise and fall; the party in power today may be out of power tomorrow. Thus, anyone advocating for regulating speech today should consider what would happen if their worst political opponent were to wield the same power over them tomorrow, because there is a very high chance it will happen sooner or later...
The solution today is the same as it has been for the better part of our national history: more speech, which allows true speech to outshine false statements in a marketplace of ideas. As distasteful as that may be at times, the alternative, positioning government as an arbiter of truth, is far more dangerous to the long-term health of American democracy."
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The Courts
By Jim Saunders, News Service of Florida
.....As a federal judge considers whether to block a new state law that Gov. Ron DeSantis dubbed the “Stop WOKE Act,” businesses filed a second challenge Wednesday alleging that the law violates First Amendment rights.
The law, passed during this year’s legislative session, restricts the way certain race-related concepts can be taught in public schools and in workplace training.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in federal court in Tallahassee by two businesses and a consultant who conducts workplace training, alleges that the law is “an immediate infringement of plaintiffs’ free speech rights.”
“This law enacts unconstitutional viewpoint-based restrictions on the speech of Florida’s business owners and employers operating within the state in violation of their First Amendment rights,” the lawsuit said. “It employs nebulous terms with vague definitions to chill protected speech with which Florida’s governor and certain elected officials disagree, while protecting speech more aligned with their viewpoints on certain issues.”
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Congress
By Tessa Capeloto
.....On June 16, 2022, a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced the Fighting Foreign Influence Act, which would impose a range of new disclosure requirements and limitations on think tanks, former government officials, and political campaigns. The current proposal would, among other changes, amend the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) to impose a lifetime ban on some former government officials from ever lobbying for a foreign government or foreign political party.
The bill, found here, contains three main provisions: a requirement that think tanks and other tax-exempt organizations disclose foreign donations, a ban on select former U.S. officials from ever lobbying for a foreign principal, and a requirement that political campaigns verify that anyone making an online contribution has a valid U.S. address. Specifically:
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FEC
By Hans A. von Spakovsky
.....Put simply, the Democratic commissioners are violating federal law. By refusing to disclose that meritless complaints have been dismissed, they are misleading the public and the courts and aiding and abetting their allies’ attempts to smear their political opponents. As their fellow commissioners noted, this cynical abuse of power “exercises a corrosive influence on” the commission and “undermines fundamental fairness” and “foundational notions of due process” for candidates, political parties, and independent organizations who participate in the political process...
While these cases remain in FEC limbo, partisan lawfare operations like the Campaign Legal Center are able to sue the accused, even though the Commission has already decided no violation of the law occurred. Liberal media and the organizations filing the dubious complaints may also continue to publicly defame and malign the targeted organizations by claiming they violated federal law.
This perversion of the system has hit close to home for me.
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SEC
By Ramya Krishnan
.....Republican attorneys general are trying to use the First Amendment to derail proposed Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules that would require public companies to make climate-related disclosures. Their arguments are misguided. Here’s why...
Citing a case called Reed v. Town of Gilbert, Republican attorneys general argue that the proposed rules should be subject to strict scrutiny because they are content-based restrictions on speech. Not only this, they strongly suggest that the entire SEC disclosure regime should be subject to this framework, a framework that—not for nothing—is often described as "strict in theory, fatal in fact."
Accepting this argument would be disastrous—not only for securities regulation but also for other areas of extensive government regulation, like antitrust and labor law.
Thankfully, the state attorneys general are wrong, as a June 17 letter we sent on behalf of First Amendment scholars explains.
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Political Giving
By Jane L. Sumner
.....In my book “The Cost of Doing Politics,” I show that public attention to companies’ political behavior does change what they do, even if no one stops buying their products. But instead of stopping companies from donating to politicians and political causes, it can push companies to hide — but continue — their support.
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The States
By Eugene Volokh
.....The court's analysis is complicated, but in essence the court treated the signs as tantamount to residential picketing, and the injunction as tantamount to a content-neutral ban on residential picketing, which is permissible if it "'burden[ed] no more speech than necessary to serve' Pennsylvania's right to residential privacy" (see Frisby v. Schultz (1988) and Madsen v. Women's Health Center (1994)). The court remanded to the trial court to decide whether the injunction passed this test, since the trial court judge had applied the slightly less speech-protective test for content-neutral statutes that impose time, place, and manner regulations (under which the laws just have to be "narrowly tailored" to the government interest and leave open ample alternative channels for expression).
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Read an article you think we would be interested in? Send it to Tiffany Donnelly at [email protected]. For email filters, the subject of this email will always begin with "Institute for Free Speech Media Update."
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The Institute for Free Speech is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that promotes and defends the First Amendment rights to freely speak, assemble, publish, and petition the government. Please support the Institute's mission by clicking here. For further information, visit www.ifs.org.
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