The left continues its stalking of conservative groups

John Daniel Davidson & Brooke Rollins:

Last week the left-wing British newspaper the Guardian published a trove of funding proposals that were privately submitted to the State Policy Network (SPN) — a nonprofit group that coordinates state-level efforts to enact free-market reforms — by state-based think tanks. (One of the documents was a proposal from our institution, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, about reforming Medicaid to better serve low-income Texans.) The publication of the documents is not so much a piece of investigative reporting as it is a modern-day recurrence of 19th-century yellow journalism.

The Guardian justified its actions on the grounds that the public needs “full and fair access” to the conservative groups’ plans, “to allow the public to reach its own conclusions about whether these activities comply with the spirit of non-profit tax-exempt charities.” The clear implication is that the groups in question are nefarious beneficiaries of “dark money” from corporate interests seeking to control state politics.

But the real purpose of the Guardian’s hit piece is far more disturbing than any corporatist conspiracy theory: It is meant to undermine the freedoms of expression and association that all Americans enjoy under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The Guardian is well aware of these protections; they are why the paper has been able to publish many of the documents stolen by Edward Snowden. But for the activist Left, those freedoms shouldn’t extend to conservative and libertarian groups.

The Guardian’s aim is to intimidate Americans who support the work of liberty-minded organizations. They seek to deter them by falsely suggesting wrongdoing – as they did to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) last year — and by stripping donors and supporters of their constitutional right to anonymity. That right was expressly recognized in a 1958 U.S. Supreme Court case, NAACP v. Alabama, in which the court affirmed that “freedom to engage in association for the advancement of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of the ‘liberty’ assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

But the Guardian story is not an isolated incident. It is part of a deliberate, coordinated effort across the political left to silence Americans who speak against — and lawfully resist — the growth of government power.

Our own confidential donor list was illegally leaked by the IRS last year and wound up in the hands of the Texas Observer, a far-left statewide magazine, which promptly published it. It’s no surprise, then, that the Guardian shared its SPN documents with the Observer last week for dissemination in Texas, just as it did for the Portland Press Herald in Maine.

The disclosure this spring that the IRS had improperly targeted conservative tea-party groups seeking nonprofit status ahead of the 2012 presidential election has turned into something even more sinister. Instead of reining in its Treasury Department in light of these abuses, the White House recently directed the IRS to clamp down on the political activities of tax-exempt nonprofits.

Elected officials are also piling on. U.S. senator Elizabeth Warren’s letter to Wall Street CEOs last week demanding disclosure of financial contributions to Washington think tanks is as blatant an effort to suppress political speech as her Senate colleague Dick Durbin’s August letter to supporters of ALEC (including us) demanding their positions on stand-your-ground legislation.

Even tax-exempt nonprofits on the left have joined the fray. In November, the liberal Center for Media and Democracy launched a campaign to reveal the identities of anonymous donors to conservative groups in last year’s effort to unseat Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. It also filed a records request demanding every e-mail the Texas legislature had received from the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
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This attack by the left is clearly for the purpose of identifying those they see as political enemies and harassing them in an effort to defund conservative organizations.  It is a very sinister operation and we saw some of the the results in the attacks on Romney donors in 2012.