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 The Editorial Board
.....At the federal level, the Justices have been active in striking down overweening regulations on political expression...
But fewer skeptical eyes are on the 50 states, which is why it’s worth spending a few minutes to read a new report from the Institute for Free Speech. It’s an index of how state laws and regulations treat political committees, grass-roots advocacy, independent expenditures, and the like. The results aren’t partisan, and they’re probably not what you expect...
“Complex regulations impede independent scholars, small groups of advocates, and passionate citizens from making a difference,” the institute says. “The only voices who can speak effectively are those already in power—the professionalized political actors with the resources necessary to operate in an increasingly legalistic and bureaucratic environment.”
The bottom line is that whether they live in Florida or California or any place in between, citizens shouldn’t need a legal team on retainer to speak out on political issues.
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New from the Institute for Free Speech
.....The Institute for Free Speech released a first-of-its-kind report today grading the freedom of citizens and advocacy groups in each state to speak about candidates, government, and issues of public policy. The 2022 Free Speech Index is the most comprehensive examination ever published of state laws regulating speech about government and its policies.
As detailed in an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, the Free Speech Index is a resource for researchers, policymakers, and the public to better understand and study the laws that regulate Americans’ political speech and association rights in the states. Each state was graded across ten different areas of law that burden speakers and groups. In each category, states earned the greatest number of points if their laws either do not burden or impose relatively small burdens on citizens’ First Amendment rights...
Sadly, most states performed poorly in the analysis...
“Policymakers too often treat free speech as an afterthought when considering new laws. The Index shows that this approach leads to a patchwork of rules and regulations that work together to make it significantly harder to effectively engage in politics and policy debates,” said Scott Blackburn, Research Director at the Institute for Free Speech and author of the report.
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The Courts
By Dan Margolies
.....At a Jan. 13, 2022, board meeting at which Steele and two other newly elected board members were sworn in, Gilmore got up to speak during the public comment portion.
After Gilmore made an apparent reference to Steele and her father’s expenditures on behalf of her campaign — and called Steele’s father, Johnson County precinct committeeman Jim Randall, a liar — the president of the board, Joe Beveridge, said, “You’re done. You are done.”
After a few more seconds of heated exchange, Beveridge called for a five-minute break, during which a school security employee and an assistant superintendent escorted her to Gilmore's chair to collect her things and told her to leave the building.
At the time, the school board had a policy, since revised, allowing the school board president to interrupt statements that were disruptive or “not germane to the business activities of the Board.” ...
Gilmore's lawsuit originally challenged the Olathe school board’s old policy, but after it was revised in April, she amended it to challenge the new policy as well. The new policy deleted a provision that the school board president could deny speaking privileges to anyone making “personal attacks, or rude or defamatory remarks” about school district employees or students.
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By Elura Nanos
.....The ACLU announced Monday that it is taking on the case of a Delaware women whose vanity license plate reading “FCANCER” was recalled by the Delaware Department of Motor Vehicles.
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.....A California man pleaded guilty yesterday in the Western District of Texas to conspiracy to solicit millions of dollars in contributions to two political action committees based on false and misleading representations that the funds would be used to support presidential candidates during and after the 2016 election cycle.
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FEC
By Adav Noti, Erin Chlopak, Catherine Hinckley Kelley, Kevin P. Hancock, and Saurav Ghosh
.....To truly fix the FEC, we need the systemic reform that only Congressional legislation can provide.
Ideally, this would create a nonpartisan advisory panel to identify and recommend qualified nominees, make it harder to override the general counsel’s recommendation that investigations move forward in the early stages and address the weaknesses in the agency’s structure that have led to deadlock.
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Free Expression
By Eugene Volokh
.....Last Tuesday and Wednesday, I blogged the Introduction and the beginning of the argument in favor of such statutes, followed by an explanation of why such statutes usually don't violate employers' constitutional rights. This week, I discuss some other arguments against such statutes (and you can see the whole article right now, if you'd like, by looking at the PDF). I begin today with arguments that the statutes should be rejected in order to protect employers' rights, even if not constitutionally protected rights, not to associate.
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Candidates and Campaigns
By Chris Stirewalt
.....Timing of an official announcement may not matter for the electorate, but for the de facto frontrunner, it is a matter of serious financial significance. As a candidate in fact, but not in filing, Trump can do pretty much whatever he wants with probably more than $100 million of the quarter of a billion dollars he raised in the wake of the 2020 election when he was begging money for a non-existent Election Defense Fund to help him overturn the result. The money instead was directed to his leadership PAC, which has few restrictions on how or how much money Trump wants to spend. He can pay himself and his family members for services, cover travel costs, stage campaign rallies (as long as he doesn’t say the magic words), and even spend $60,000 on a fashion designer...
Since then, he has kept up a steady barrage of fundraising appeals to his army of small-dollar donors with scammy, spammy messages and even a plea to replace his broken down “Trump Force One.” A Democratic group alleging that Trump is running a shadow campaign through the PAC said in a complaint to the Federal Election Commission that the former president’s group is spending $100,000 a week on Facebook ads and “has consistently raised more than $1 million per week.” But that grift ends—or at least shifts—as soon as Trump files his candidacy papers with the Federal Election Commission.
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Independent Groups
By Mary Ellen Klas, Nicholas Nehamas, and Ana Claudia Chacin
.....The documents show that the utility sent $200,000 to the nonprofit, a Washington D.C.-based group called Broken Promises, in the fall of 2018. Within five weeks, Broken Promises had donated $20,000 to Goston’s political committee and spent roughly $115,000 on mailers and advertising supporting him. Best of all for Florida Power & Light: Because of its nonprofit status, Broken Promises didn’t have to disclose its donors — meaning the cash was untraceable. No one would know that the utility had paid to secretly manipulate a state election in favor of Republicans. Voters were in the dark about who funded Goston and why.
The records tying the utility to Broken Promises — which come from inside its political consulting firm — mark the first time that Florida Power & Light cash has been directly linked to a series of election scandals rocking Florida politics. They raise questions about whether the utility “subverted” a free and fair election in Gainesville, said Saurav Ghosh, director of federal campaign finance reform at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center in Washington, D.C.
“This is pretty much the nightmare scenario,” Ghosh said. “You have a powerful corporate player in Florida politics using its financial resources to defeat a candidate without any disclosure to the public. … This is election rigging.”
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The States
By Jonathan Turley
.....From California to Illinois, legislators are moving to boycott any state contracts with businesses in states with anti-LGBTQ legislation or restrictive abortion laws. At the same time, many Democratic leaders are pressuring companies to boycott red states too…
The point of these campaigns is to pressure state officials to ignore the will of a majority of their citizens and pass laws to appeal to corporations and other states in a competitive market. Such boycotts by private citizens or groups are an important form of political speech...
However, states or companies engaging in such boycotts is a different matter…
There is a way to end this madness. It is an Article 5-like alliance.
While this would ideally be an agreement by all states, red states should pass legislation barring state business or travel with any state that engages in boycotts. The key would be that the agreement must stand on principle, allow no exceptions, and trigger immediate reciprocity: A travel ban on, say, Nebraska would result in a reciprocal ban not just from Nebraska but from every state in the alliance.
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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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