The Supreme Court will consider next month whether to take a case with big implications for charitable giving throughout the nonprofit sector.
The case, Center for Competitive Politics v. Harris, is a challenge to the authority of California’s attorney general, Kamala Harris, to demand all donor information from any charity that registers with the state.
Harris demands that if your nonprofit school, AIDS charity, or your church wants to solicit donations from any of the 39 million people who live in California (as nearly one-eighth of America’s charities currently do) you must give the state the federally protected and confidential tax information of people who give you money.
This case could have implications for some political advocacy groups, but the more immediate danger is to non-political charities, 501(c)(3) organizations, which cannot engage in any sort of electoral activity. Under IRS rules, they are not required to give donors’ names to anyone but the federal agency, which strictly protects the information, with felony penalties for those who break the law. California law offers no such protection for this information.
There is no reason for California to demand details about donors unless public officials plan to harrass donors. It is reasonable to assume this is Harris’s probable purpose. There is no statute requiring it; it’s something that the attorney general, who happens to be a candidate for Senate, demanded on her own.
There is a Supreme Court precedent covering this, a 1958 case known as NAACP v. Alabama. In that case, a state was harassing a civil rights organization for what was technically a violation of state law, the failure to hand over its membership list. The NAACP won that case. The main way in which the current case differs from that one is that the organizations being forced to hand over donor lists are not even accused of any technical breach of the law.
As the Philanthropy Roundtable notes in its friend-of-the-court brief, the new California rule “unnecessarily abridges philanthropic freedom and threatens to chill charitable giving, thereby weakening the ability of individual donors, grantmaking institutions, and operating charities to carry out their charitable goals and missions.” Many donors “simply will not give unless they can keep their donations confidential.”
Philanthropists have any number of reasons to remain anonymous. Perhaps they do not want their generosity rewarded with a barrage of endless solicitations from other groups. Perhaps they do not want their neighbors to know they have a lot of money. Or perhaps their motives are more spiritual; as Jesus put it in the Gospel, they would rather give in secret, and be rewarded by their Father in Heaven who sees in secret.
Whatever their motivations, donors to charities that educate the public and help the poor are society’s benefactors. California has a legitimate interest in keeping charities honest, but not in subjecting their donors to the intrusion.
We hope the Supreme Court takes this case and grants the injunction that the plaintiffs are seeking. Even better, we hope that Harris will see the folly of this scheme and withdraw her demands.
