Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, is worried that too many groups are expressing political views without providing a list of all their supporters to the government they may be criticizing. So he’s put out a video about it, and it’s deeply misleading in some key ways.
On January 8, the Supreme Court quietly took a small case on its docket, @AFPhq v. Becerra. This case gives The Court That Dark Money Built the chance to further protect & conceal dark money destroying our democracy. If you care about an honest government, this is an ALARM. pic.twitter.com/h5L306qhds
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) March 3, 2021
There are a dozen silly things about this video, including (1) Whitehouse drawing a totally tendentious connection between this case and the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, (2) Whitehouse saying the Supreme Court “quietly” granted cert in this case AFP v. Becerra, (3) calling it a “technical case.” It’s a pretty significant constitutional case based on the question: How broad are the First Amendment’s protections.
Specifically, California tries to force all groups that comment on politics to disclose to the government the names and addresses of their donors. In these days where politicians lean on corporate America to punish political enemies, this is scary.
Whitehouse and California want to narrow those protections. The people who want to keep them broad? That’s where Whitehouse is deeply misleading.
“Look at the flock of dark money front groups that have urged the court to take the case,” he says. His video then starts rolling a list of names of some of the groups to file amicus curiae briefs.
“Why so many of them?” Whitehouse asks. “Why do they care so much?”
Both of these questions deserve a reply.
I’ll answer his second question first: Maybe these groups care so much about this case because when the government starts demanding membership and donor lists from everyone who criticizes government, that chills speech.
And along those lines, I’ll answer his first question with another question: If Whitehouse is trying to demonstrate that “so many” groups oppose California’s regulations on political speech, why did he leave off so many of the groups siding against him and with “dark money”? For instance, the Council on American Islamic Relations, the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Human Rights Campaign, PEN America, and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
These are all liberal or left-wing groups that filed amicus curiae briefs — that is, they “urged the court to take the case” in Whitehouse’s words — because they oppose rules like California’s member-disclosure rules.
“The compelled disclosure of an expressive association’s members or supporters threatens to chill free association,” they argue in their brief.
Yet this is how Whitehouse describes the NAACP’s and the ACLU’s side of the argument while pretending only right-wing “dark money” groups are on the right side:
“Big dark money groups have started to refuse to answer questions about dark money. And dark money forces shepherded the last three justices on to the Supreme Court. Dark Money forces are claiming a constitutional right to dark money.”
He calls the conservative Supreme Court majority “the court that Dark Money built.” Whitehouse’s ceaseless implication throughout is that “Dark Money” is a force solely of the Right. This is, of course, totally and demonstrably false.
Dark money favored Democrats 2-to-1 in the 2020 election. Dark money groups spent 6 times as much supporting President Biden’s election as supporting Donald Trump’s. The single biggest dark-money spender, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, is Defending Democracy Together, a Never Trump group that spent more than twice as much as the biggest pro-Trump dark money group.
More importantly, Whitehouse is on the side of regulating political speech and thus trying to keep political dissidents in line.
It’s no wonder he feels the need to mislead the public about who’s on his side and who’s on the side of free expression.
