Jacob Grier

Those of us of a libertarian bent have two very interesting cases in the courts right now, both carefully crafted to vindicate lost constitutional rights. The newest involves SpeechNow, an organization aimed at defeating candidates hostile to free political speech. Writing in the Washington Post, former Federal Election Commission Chairman Bradley Smith and Institute for Justice attorney Steve Simpson explain what’s at stake:

Political activist David Keating created SpeechNow.org to give individual Americans a way to speak about candidates free of the byzantine campaign finance regulations that apply to modern political speech. The group’s particular mission is to protect First Amendment rights at the ballot box — to buy ads urging citizens to vote for politicians who support free speech and against those who do not — but its model could be applied to any issue or candidate a group of voters cares about.

SpeechNow.org is an independent group of citizens spending their own money on their own speech. It does not accept corporate or union contributions, makes no donations to politicians or parties and does not coordinate its activities with them. It will also fully disclose its contributions and expenditures to the Federal Election Commission…

Nonetheless, according to federal campaign finance laws and the FEC, SpeechNow.org must become a “political committee,” a PAC, and comply with a host of regulations that rival the tax laws in burden and complexity. Failure to do so could result in up to five years in prison for contributors and the principals of the group…

Imposing limits on groups such as SpeechNow.org ends up hurting the very people whom backers of campaign finance regulation always claim they’re trying to help — people of average means who must pool their resources to be heard — while leaving the field to the very wealthy to spend what they please.

Those are among the claims SpeechNow.org and its members made in a lawsuit filed this week in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. It challenges the constitutionality of requiring independent groups of citizens to register and organize as political committees. For the first time, federal courts will be asked to decide whether independent political speech by groups of individual American citizens has the full protection of the First Amendment.

The other is District of Columbia v. Heller, the challenge to DC’s gun ban that may end up being the first substantive Supreme Court case on the Second Amendment in 70 years. There’s been lots of commentary on the case, but my favorite article so far is this New York Times profile on its architect, Cato’s Robert Levy.