Latest Developments:
- The United States Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an individual who is associated with a nonprofit organization but was not paid, spent no money, and made no gifts to public officials in the course of expressing his views to public officials and testifying before the state legislature is not required to register as a lobbyist. In Calzone v. Summers, the court concluded that Missouri cannot require the plaintiff to register for engaging in First Amendment activities. The state’s lobby registration and disclosure requirements – as applied – violate his First Amendment rights.
- The Governor of New York signed A. 1641, which requires that all candidates and committees file their reports electronically. The bill removes a $1,000 threshold and thus requires that all state and local candidates and committees file using the State Board of Election’s system. Local paper filings are no longer required. The measure takes effect on December 15.
- The Tallahassee City Commission voted to ask the City Attorney’s Office to draft amendments to the city’s existing ethics ordinance, according to Tallahassee Reports. The proposal, as described by the City Attorney in a workshop with the Commission, would generally grant more authority to the city’s Independent Ethics Board and would add procurement employees, among others, as “covered individuals” subject to ethics rules. The proposal would, among other things, make contracts voidable if influenced by a prohibited gift, extend gift rules to all “covered individuals” (not just elected and appointed officials), increase penalties on lobbyists who fail to register, and require that vendors disclose campaign contributions. An initial draft ordinance will be revised and presented back to the City Commission for approval.
In Case You Missed It:
- Lobbyist or Victim-Advocate?: The Albany Times-Union reports that an alleged rape victim, who did not register as a lobbyist, has filed suit against the New York Joint Commission on Public Ethics (JCOPE) for “conducting an ‘improper and abusive’ investigation into (the alleged victim) over her efforts to raise awareness about sexual assault and support for passing the Child Victim’s Act in 2018.” Apparently she spent more than the $5,000 (from a settlement with the prep school where she was allegedly raped as a child) on advertisements, including billboards, an amount that exceeds threshold for lobbyist expenditures to require registration. The New York Post notes that the “state’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics is standing by its decision to investigate a rape survivor for violating lobbying laws.” (Editor’s note: New York is in the Second Circuit, not the Eighth Circuit; see Calzone v. Summers, above.)
- Taxpayer-Funded Lobbying not Transparent: Leaders in rural Douglas County, Oregon spent “at least $43,000” over a four-year period traveling to Washington, D.C. to lobby federal officials to allow more timber harvesting activity. The Oregonian reports that its questions and requests for information have yielded receipts for $579 worth of spending; the county is asking for $1,900 to pay for the time required to find the rest of the receipts. The paper says that “Douglas County commissioners have used (a federal safety net) program to award themselves $30,000 a year to pay for lobbying trips. It’s unclear exactly how much has been spent.”
- Twitter says “No” to Political Ads: Twitter announced that it will no longer carry political advertisements. CNN tells us that Twitter earned less than $3 million from the sale of political advertisements in the 2018 election cycle. Facebook, which will continue to carry political ads, estimates that business will amount to less than 0.5% of its revenues next year.
- Facebook and Google said it too, but “No” didn’t mean “No”: Both Facebook and Google announced they would no longer sell state and local political advertisements in the State of Washington, according to the Seattle Times. But since their announcements, both have continued to sell tens of thousands of dollars in political ads in the state. Last week, the Times found at least 15 different ads for Seattle city council candidates on Facebook, noting that “(s)ome of those ads had been seen as many as 200,000 times, according to Facebook’s library of political ads.” Both of those companies agreed to stop selling the ads after they were sued by the state’s Attorney General for failure to comply with the state’s strict campaign-finance disclosure laws and collectively paid $450,000 to settle the suit. According to the Times, “(i)t’s not illegal for campaigns and PACs to advertise on Google and Facebook, it just runs counter to the companies’ self-imposed and self-enforced policies.”