September 30, 2019
By Matt Miller
America is home to nearly 2 million nonprofit organizations and their supporters. Most of them don’t know it yet, but there is a war currently being fought on their behalf.
This war involves the extent to which the government is entitled to know the identities of people who support those nonprofits (and, in some cases, whether the government can publish those identities on the internet). Indeed, the battle has been taken all the way to the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court, where the Thomas More Law Center is asking the Court to decide whether the state of California is entitled to a list of the group’s top donors. Last week, the Goldwater Institute submitted an amicus brief urging the Court to take the case.
With ideological harassment and “cancel culture” on the rise, nonprofit donors have more reasons than ever to be concerned about being put on a government list. Consider these examples:
As the Institute points out in our amicus brief, “Not only does the trend of forcing organizations to disclose confidential donor information chill the free speech rights of both these individuals and these organizations, but it also exacerbates the dangerously undemocratic tendency to short-circuit debate over the merits of public policy proposals, and to focus instead on personal animosities and personal demonization rather than persuasion.”
This is not a road America wants to go down. 501(c)(3) nonprofits are different from groups that support and oppose political candidates because 501(c)(3) groups are prohibited by law from having anything to do with candidate elections. As a result, the interests the government usually asserts in campaign finance cases—preventing corruption and the appearance of corruption—do not apply. Instead, the government claims an inchoate “right to know” who is supporting nonprofit groups. But there is no “right to know” in the Constitution. Instead, there is a right to speak and to associate freely. By collecting—and often publishing—the names of nonprofit donors, the government infringes on those rights.
Matt Miller is a Senior Attorney at the Goldwater Institute.
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