At City Journal, Myron Magnet reports that:
A handful of state attorneys general, including New York’s ever-officious Eric Schneiderman, has sued Exxon Mobil Corp. to force hugely expensive disclosure of its climate research over the last decade, in what most observers agree is a campaign to chill the freedom of speech guaranteed in the First Amendment—in this case, to shut up those who deny that there is such thing as significant, man-made climate change—not to mention the infringement of the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures….
Now, Schneiderman has doubled down on his assault on the First Amendment. As overseer of the state’s nonprofit corporations, he decreed that 501(c)(4) advocacy groups must disclose the names of all donors of more than $5,000, and federal district judge Sidney Stein has just upheld his rule against a challenge from conservative nonprofit Citizens United. Citizens United argued that its donors’ First Amendment rights were being infringed, since having their names disclosed would expose them to possible backlash in ultra-left-wing New York State. This is not a silly fear, as the donors to the 2008 campaign for Proposition 8, a successful California initiative outlawing same-sex marriage, discovered when death threats poured in and when boycotts of their businesses forced them out of their jobs. And that’s because ultra-left-wing California had also chilled free speech with a donor-disclosure diktat. (The U.S. Supreme Court later nullified the proposition, which received 52 percent of all votes cast.)
Madison would not get the joke that the Constitution’s imagined “right to privacy” allows unrestricted abortion but doesn’t protect anonymous donations to those advocating political propositions they support. And since he believed that the freedom to believe what you want and to say so were the most fundamental of all liberties, he would throw up his hands at an Eric Schneiderman.
Lesser mortals would say, General Schneiderman, what about the Clinton Foundation?
