IPFS News Link • Free Speech
Does Transparency Trump the First Amendment?
• Goldwater Institute/Nick DraniasIndependent groups are right to resist. Applied to independent expenditures, Arizona’s political committee regulations are essentially the same as those struck down in Citizens United. Both threaten civil or criminal penalties merely for raising and spending money to talk about politics.
To avoid such sanctions, both sets of regulations require forming and registering an elaborate political organization, complete with segregated accounts, appointed officers and responsibility for regular financial reporting, as well as exposure to audits by governmental agencies. This forces groups who want to engage in political speech to develop an expertise in volumes of campaign finance laws, related regulations, and agency interpretations of regulations.
As a result, both sets of regulations minimally impact well-funded, politically-connected groups, but heavily impact the least sophisticated, the least connected, and the most underfunded.
Neither the federal government nor Arizona have the constitutional authority to require such high regulatory hurdles for independent groups engaging in free speech. The First Amendment does not allow “transparency” to become a banner under which the government silences independent voices.