Congress could soon take up a bill that would quietly expand the federal government’s power to catalog who backs which lawsuits in America. Rep. Ben Cline’s (R-VA) Protecting Our Courts from Foreign Manipulation Act has already cleared the House Judiciary Committee, and it deserves much closer scrutiny than its title suggests.
The bill is pitched as a response to foreign manipulation of the courts. That concern is understandable. But the mechanism Congress is being asked to bless is one that defenders of donor privacy should recognize immediately: Compel disclosure first, promise restraint later, and hope no one notices how quickly a narrow pretext becomes a broader system of exposure.
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Americans have long understood a basic rule in a free society. Transparency is for those who exercise public power. Privacy is for private citizens. That principle matters not only in political debates but also wherever people join together to support lawful causes without fear that the government will put their names, affiliations, and activities into a file.
That is the real problem with H.R. 2675. Cline’s bill would require disclosure of the underlying funding agreements whenever a firm financing a case takes overseas investment, including from private individuals in allied countries. Worse still, it then directs the Department of Justice to compile a list with the identities and personal information of those individuals.
This is not a narrow national security tool. The bill reaches funding tied, directly or indirectly, in whole or in part, to foreign sources. It does not stop at hostile regimes. Rather, it sweeps far more broadly, pulling in arrangements touched by ordinary international capital and creating pressure to expose private financial relationships and personal information that have nothing to do with espionage or sabotage.
That is how disclosure regimes travel. They begin with an unsympathetic target — a foreign actor, a controversial group, a supposedly rare abuse. Then, the precedent hardens, the machinery stays in place, and the circle widens. Today, the justification is foreign influence. Tomorrow, the same logic is used against domestic funders and donors, advocacy organizations, religious groups, or anyone else politicians in power decide should be named, tracked, and deterred.
The Supreme Court first recognized, in NAACP v. Alabama, and has since repeatedly reaffirmed, that compelled disclosure can chill association. That principle applies just as surely when the government forces disclosure of the people or entities backing litigation. When support for a legal cause means possible exposure to federal officials, opposing parties, and eventually Congress, many citizens will decide that participation is no longer worth the risk.
That concern should resonate strongly with conservatives. For years, center-right and religious causes have been targets of campaigns designed to shame, harass, and isolate supporters. Privacy is what allows citizens to support causes they believe in without inviting retaliation. A disclosure regime that conditions participation in litigation on exposure to adversaries and government officials cuts directly against that principle.
And make no mistake about where this path can lead. Rep. Darrell Issa’s (R-CA) H.R. 1109, the Litigation Transparency Act, would require parties in federal civil cases to disclose the identities of any and all individuals supporting litigation and produce the agreements to the court and other parties. Once Congress normalizes the idea that litigation funding must be exposed up front, the path to blanket disclosure gets much shorter.
A related push in Congress, the Tackling Predatory Litigation Funding Act, introduced by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK), would further require litigants to report the identities of the individuals supporting their cases to the IRS.
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That legislation is just another way to route sensitive information, tying specific cases to specific funders into federal hands, with the same risks to privacy and the same deterrent effect on lawful participation in the courts.
Congress can confront genuine foreign threats without building a new disclosure apparatus that erodes the privacy of law-abiding citizens and chills support for lawful litigation. If transparency is for government and privacy is for citizens, then Congress should reject these bills and leave Americans free to support lawful causes without the threat of doxing, targeting, or being exposed on a federal list.
Heather Lauer is the CEO of People United for Privacy Foundation.
