Ilya Shapiro and Randal John Meyer
Cato, joined by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has filed a brief supporting CCP’s request that the Supreme Court review the case. The Ninth Circuit failed to give proper solicitude to CCP’s constitutional rights here by not applying what lawyers call “heightened scrutiny” at each turn of its analysis. Instead, the lower court applied a party-specific, “as-applied” exception to the general rule that’s only relevant if the compelled disclosure has already survived a broader, “facial” challenge—and it collapsed the clear distinction between the importance of the government interest in disclosure and the extent of the nexus between the disclosure and the asserted interest.
The court also missed the implications of its decision; not only is the NAACP subject to this disclosure regime—the very organization whose resistance to compelled disclosure culminated in the landmark case of NAACP v. Alabama (1958), which protects the right to anonymous association—but the largest, richest, and most politically active state now has this blanket disclosure regime, chilling First Amendment freedoms.
