I generally enjoy Patrick McKenzie’s writing. After quickly skimming this post, I don’t see anything objectionable from a journalistic standpoint. However, I firmly believe the federal indictment of the SPLC is motivated purely by political motives. Out of all the possible financial crimes the federal government can investigate and prosecute, they target a well-known progressive organization that’s spent decades fighting for marginalized communities against white nationalists? This is a miscarriage of justice wrapped in a thin veneer of respectability.
This is completely irrelevant to the article. The SPLC committed wire fraud to subsidise the supply of and activities of the kinds of people they told their supporters they were against. Separately, they worked hard over a period of years to censor their political opponents in a partisan fashion. Those are illegal acts. If you want to defend their actions as such by all means do so. But if you’re just pointing out that the motivating factor behind this particular prosecution might not have been entirely apolitical so what?
No one expects the US court system or US attorneys general to act apolitically. The Obama administration extensively used the IRS to target Republicans as such. If you don’t want to be prosecuted for illegal conduct, you should not do illegal things. Alternatively, you could arrange to never lose elections so that your friends are always in power.
Private actors working hard to censor political adversaries is not necessarily illegal, for what it's worth. You could say it's problematic for other reasons, and if you mesh in with campaign financing you start to face (long shot) bank-shot legal arguments, but generally partisanship is a time-honored American tradition.
> "Private actors working hard to censor political adversaries is not necessarily illegal, for what it's worth."
"Private actors" is doing quite a bit of work here.
For individuals working in their personal capacity, you're mostly correct. The rules change for certain jobs.
BUT that's not the situation here. In this case, we have the SPLC - a registered 501(c)(3) - that appears to have worked to censor political adversaries. And the law specifically bars that, making it illegal.
> Under the Internal Revenue Code, all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. Contributions to political campaign funds or public statements of position (verbal or written) made on behalf of the organization in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity. Violating this prohibition may result in denial or revocation of tax-exempt status and the imposition of certain excise taxes.
You're trying to axiomatically derive election law here. Every word in the statute matters. It is very probably perfectly lawful for SPLC to work to censor ideologies, even up to the point where those ideologies are coterminous with party definitions. The whole edifice of Citizens United is based on a sharp divide between advocacy and campaign finance; the argument you're putting forward is disfavored.
(That's not to say SPLC couldn't have fucked up and crossed the line, just that the general description given upthread of what they were doing did not in fact describe a violation of law).
Upthread summarizes Patrick accurately but maybe too succinctly, so to lay it out specifically:
In the post, Patrick demonstrates that the SPLC cofounded and led Change the Terms (CTT) then goes on to demonstrate CTT targeted a specific political candidate's fundraising. The first is fine, the second is illegal.
Check out the section titled "July 2021: The CTT coalition attempts non-partisan interdiction of Trump PAC fundraising" for specific quotes and even a picture of a mobile billboard they funded.
That is neither "ideologies" nor "party definitions"
Sorry, what I should’ve said was that it was illegal for them to try and do it since they’re supposed to be non-partisan as a condition of their tax status. Same way as the Brookings Institution maintains the tissue thing pretence that it’s not a Democratic organisation. It is some other kind of thing that just happens to always do what the Democrats want to do. There’s nothing illegal about trying to send her and ruin the lives of your political opponents as long as you stay with the law but it is illegal for SPLC to be part of a partisan political campaign.
Again, I'm not disputing anything in Patrick's post, and I totally buy SPLC could have stepped over the line in a number of ways, but being a 501c(3) just means you can't directly contribute to campaigns. You can do as much partisan advocacy as you want. There is absolutely no requirement that a 501c(3) be non-partisan; they just can't participate in campaigns.
For 501(c)(3)s, it is. In exchange for tax-exempt status, a group loses certain options.
But the DOJ wouldn't touch those charges though as they're civil (IRS under Treasury) and the criminal charges could be fatal to the org by themselves.
Though, regardless of the criminal outcome, if the facts in the indictment are proven, I'd wager the IRS' case is proven implicitly which could also be fatal.
No it isn't. A 501c3 can't participate directly in a campaign. That's it, that's the whole rule. Plenty of 501c3's are nakedly and openly partisan. Center For American Progress is a c3. Heritage is a c3. AEI is a c3. Claremont is a c3.
It's the opposite: elected or not, governments are strictly limited in their ability to do anything like what SPLC did, because they are bound by the Constitution. Private entities are not; they're free to associate, advocate, and advocate for associations or disassociations, generally however they'd like.
I guess this case is especially interesting and novel because of how the government has deputized banks as ersatz law enforcement, and banks have delegated decision making to SPLC as ersatz compliance officers.
I’m not sure what the law could and should be in this case, but I suspect it’s woefully underspeced to the chagrin of most parties.
There's a few interesting threads in the article that I found interesting. One is about the aggregation of power using social pressure. I've heard whispers of similar things, but it was interesting to see the specifics of how it was built. The other is the use of Donor Advised Funds (which I hadn't heard about before) to have some anonymity over the direction of donations.
What are the likely long-term consequences of this? Destruction of the SPLC and imprisonment of several officers for wire fraud? Slap on the wrist? End of the widespread use of their censorship product?
What would the maximally charitable but in contact with reality [Republican|Democrat] expect or want out of this?