[EL] fact-checking CLC's HuffPo piece

[Robbin Stewart]

http://ballots.blogspot.com/2014/01/new-lies-about-anonymous-speech-from.html

New lies about anonymous speech from Campaign Legal Center.

Here is an editorial from CLC that was published at Huffington Post.
http://www.clcblog.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=544:listeners-are-entitled-to-know-by-whom-they-are-being-persuaded

LISTENERS ARE ENTITLED TO KNOW BY WHOM THEY ARE BEING PERSUADED

L1: I'm a little surprised they chose the term "entitled"; it has some
negative baggage. Anyway, the claim is wrong. There is no general legal or
moral right to not hear speech that you don't know the authorship of.
The article goes on to call for new forms of censorship of political speech
in America, to make the world safe from democracy. Ah, now I have learned
that the title comes from an FCC publication.

I disagree with the general message, but nobody cares what I think. My
focus here will be point out factual errors in the piece.
I'm going to highlight a few sentences that I think are just out and out
wrong.
L2:
 The Supreme Court has consistently found that voters deserve to know who
is funding political communications in order to evaluate the full context
of the message.

That's not true, and they know it. NAACP v Alabama, Bates v Little Rock,
Talley v California, created a right to privacy. This right to privacy
underlies later cases such as Griswold,and Roe v Wade. Talley held that
disclaimer rules of the sort the CLC is pushing are unconstitutional.
Later, McIntyre repeated this ruling, finding that an Ohio statute require
disclaimers on candidate literature was unconstitutional. These cases are
part of a larger pateern of cases holding that th government may not
dictate the content of speech. Federation of the Blind, Tornillo v Miami
Herald, Wooley v Maynard, are examples. The Court's rulings in this area
have not been consistent.The claim is false.

L3.
The Court has also held that there is no right to anonymous speech when an
organization is trying to influence the outcome of a candidate's election.
The Supreme Court has explicitly rejected "the existence of a generalized
right of anonymity in speech "[

This claim seems fishy, since it lacks a citation to know what case they
are referring to. Again, in McIntyre the court found Ohio's statute
unconstitutional, and cited with approval state cases such as People v
White and New York v Duryea which had held there is a right to anonymous
speech about candidates. McIntyre technically was an as-applied case, and
the facts of the case concerned a referendum, but the court's finding that
the statute is unconstitutional is relevant. McIntyre did not act alone;
she was part of an anti-tax organization of about 60 people.

The article puts quotes around the phrase  "the existence of a generalized
right of anonymity in speech"
but did not tell us what it was quoting. The full quote in content tells a
different story.
"The existence of a generalized right of anonymity in speech was rejected
by this Court in *Lewis Publishing Co. v. Morgan,* 229 U.S. 288, 33 S.Ct.
867, 57 L.Ed. 1190 (1913)"

It is true that 101 years ago, the court had not yet recognized a
generalized right to anonymity; that didn't come until 1960. This quote
actually comes from J. Scalia's dissent in McIntyre. McIntyre, like Talley
is a case that *does *recognize a generalized right of anonymity in speech.
CLC is wrong, and probably knows it is wrong, because their quote is from
the dissent of the case that says they are wrong, but they carefully left
off the citation so we wouldn't know that.

This list is not meant to be exhaustive. I mostly wanted to point out that
it irked me when I found out they had hidden the fact that their quote came
from the dissent in the very case that proves them wrong. -30-.
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