Wisconsin’s state Senate passed an ill-advised bill today requiring issue advocacy groups to reveal their donors, exposing them to political intimidation from opposing groups and powerful politicians.
“Campaign finance disclosure laws are meant to allow citizens to monitor their government, not for government to monitor its citizens,” said Center for Competitive Politics President Sean Parnell. “This bill would allow incumbents to avoid tough critiques of their records, and it’s easy to understand why some lawmakers want to silence their critics.”
The concern that incumbents and other powerful special interests will retaliate against donors to disfavored causes has long been recognized by the Supreme Court as a rationale for protecting the privacy of donors to independent advocacy groups. In NAACP v. Alabama (1956), the Court wrote: “It is hardly a novel perception that compelled disclosure of affiliation with groups engaged in advocacy may constitute as effective a restraint on freedom of association as [other] forms of governmental action.”
The bill now heads to the state Assembly, which passed the bill on a 6-1 vote in committee. Gov. Jim Doyle has already signaled he intends to sign the measure.
Wisconsin is already facing two federal lawsuits over the recently-passed “Impartial Justice Act,” signed into law late last year by Doyle after ignoring U.S. Supreme Court precedent. The Center for Competitive Politics filed a lawsuit on behalf of Judge Randy Koschnick challenging the bill’s “rescue fund” provision for state Supreme Court candidates who accept taxpayer campaign grants.
CCP Vice President Stephen M. Hoersting’s comments to Wisconsin’s General Accountability Board in 2008 detail the jurisprudence of Supreme Court cases protecting anonymous political advocacy. Indeed, the Supreme Court is due to rule any day in Citizens United v. FEC, which directly addressed the issue at the case’s original argument. Rushing to pass a law dealing with an issue squarely before the Supreme Court in a pending case seems like a waste of the legislature’s time.
The Supreme Court cited the Center for Competitive Politics’ brief in that case in a ruling last week that touched on disclosure:
Some advocates claim that they have received confrontational phone calls and e-mail messages from opponents of Proposition 8, ibid., and others have been forced to resign their jobs after it became public that they had donated to groups supporting the amendment, see Brief for Center for Competitive Politics as Amicus Curiae 13-14, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Comm’n, No. 08-205, now pending before this Court.