The Washington Post reports on a recent report by the American Justice Partnership, which has issued a report criticial of various liberal groups that have been trying to do away with judicial elections, noting in the report that George Soros and other liberal activists have been funding the effort. Over at Election Law Blog, they seem to think that the most interesting part of the story is that AJP does not disclose its donors.
As usual, I’m puzzled as to why anybody thinks this is important. It doesn’t much affect the message, but if one feels a desperate need to know “who’s behind this,” any cub reporter with 4 minutes on his hands can quickly check the group’s web site. There you will learn that it’s “national partners” include the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, the Pacific Research Institute, the Center for Individual Freedom, the Manhattan Institute, ALEC, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Washington Legal Foundation, among others. You can also go through their website state by state to find “state partners,” such as, in Ohio, the Ohio Chamber of Commerce and the Ohio Manufacturers Association. Anybody who follows politics, elections, or election law, or who gained their job as a reporter other than through the most egregious nepotism, should have no trouble at all in figuring out AJP’S political orientation. But if that’s not enough on its own, you can look up the donors to many of these “National Partners” and thus have a pretty good idea as to whom is funding the group (and to make it easy, they include links to all these groups.)
Still baffled as to how to evaluate AJP’s message? Well, you can look to their “leadership” page and learn that Dan Pero, Chief of Staff to former Michigan Governor John Engler (who now heads the National Association of Manufacturers) is the top guy, and that Engler, Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus, and former Chrysler attorney and conservative activist Steven Hantler founded the group.
Oh, you may not know exactly who is funding AJP, just as nobody knew exactly who funded FDR’s or Truman’s or Dwight Eisenhower’s or John Kennedy’s or Lyndon Johnson’s campaigns, or Abe Lincoln’s or U.S. Grant’s or Grover Cleveland’s, but it’s beyond my intelligence to figure out what more one would gain by specific names, other than the ability to organize boycotts. I’m not sure that there is any government interest in making it easier to launch economic boycotts. The First Amendment norm, of course, is that anonymous speech is protected, and the similarly, the right to privacy is well ingrained in the American conscious. As a policy matter, I don’t think the idea that the quality of political debate has been improved by excessive disclosure and the emphasis placed these days on “who is behind the message” even passes the laugh test.
The irony here, of course, is that the Soros funded groups that tend to have an insatiable appetite for disclosure are insisting that people focus on their message, not the messenger, while the group that is critical of their funding sources won’t reveal its own, suggesting that they too believe that the emphasis should be on the message, not the messenger. Given this agreement that it’s the message, not the funding, that’s important, it’s surprising there is any debate about the overreach of disclosure laws.
