The Hispanic Leadership Fund today issued a statement regarding today’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling protecting First Amendment rights by finding that a California law attacking freedom of association was unconstitutional on its face.
The Supreme Court held by a 6-3 vote that it violates the First Amendment for a state to compel private organizations to make blanket disclosures of their donors.
HLF filed an amicus curiae brief with the Supreme Court. Both the National Association of Home Builders and the National Federation of Independent Business joined the HLF brief.
The following statement is attributable to HLF president Mario H. Lopez:
“The Hispanic Leadership Fund is pleased to have played a role in helping protect the Constitutional rights of free association and free expression of all Americans. This decision protects the ability of Americans to join in voluntary associations to support shared policy goals without fear of government intrusion. The Court properly recognized that a person’s choice of which organizations to support is a core component of the First Amendment right to free association.”
The Court also emphasized that any restrictions that burden free association must be narrowly tailored. California violated that rule by compelling all associations to disclose all of their largest donors, even where there was zero suspicion of fraud or wrongdoing. Those blanket disclosures necessarily failed narrow tailoring.
Protecting donor information has its roots in a Supreme Court case from the Jim Crow era. A unanimous court ruled in NAACP v. Alabama (1958) that government officials, who wanted to silence the civil rights organization, couldn’t force the NAACP to hand over information about their membership, because that would expose them to retaliation and chill the group’s activity protected by the First Amendment. “Inviolability of privacy in group association may in many circumstances be indispensable to preservation of freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs,” wrote the court.
The cases jointly decided today were Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Rob Bonta and Thomas More Law Center v. Rob Bonta. HLF’s amicus brief can be found here.
