01 July 2021
The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a California law that required nonprofits to hand over a list of their biggest donors.
Why it matters: Some campaign-finance advocates have feared the court will begin chipping away at disclosure rules more broadly, making it harder and harder to figure out who’s funding major political causes.
The big picture: In a 6-3 ruling authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court said California had subjected donors to the threat of public harassment and intimidation, undermining their First Amendment right to free association.
Background: California requires nonprofit organizations to give the state a list of their biggest donors each year. The state is supposed to keep that information private, but has routinely failed to do so. Donors’ names and addresses have often become easily available to the public, according to briefs in the case.
- A pair of conservative nonprofits — including Americans for Prosperity, an arm of the Koch brothers’ political empire — sued California. Its pattern of making donor information public put individual donors in physical danger, they argued, especially in this toxic political climate.
- Although conservative organizations brought the suit, the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund took their side. The most relevant precedent in this case was set in the 1950s, when Alabama tried to publicly disclose a list of NAACP members as a way to intimidate civil rights activists.
The other side: California said it collected donor information to help investigate potential fraud, but that argument didn’t get very far with the justices.
Transcripts show George Floyd told police "I can't breathe" over 20 times
Section2Newly released transcripts of bodycam footage from the Minneapolis Police Department show that George Floyd told officers he could not breathe more than 20 times in the moments leading up to his death.
Why it matters: Floyd's killing sparked a national wave of Black Lives Matter protests and an ongoing reckoning over systemic racism in the United States. The transcripts "offer one the most thorough and dramatic accounts" before Floyd's death, The New York Times writes.
The state of play: The transcripts were released as former officer Thomas Lane seeks to have the charges that he aided in Floyd's death thrown out in court, per the Times. He is one of four officers who have been charged.
- The filings also include a 60-page transcript of an interview with Lane. He said he "felt maybe that something was going on" when asked if he believed that Floyd was having a medical emergency at the time.
What the transcripts say:
- Floyd told the officers he was claustrophobic as they tried to get him into the squad car.
- The transcripts also show Floyd saying, "Momma, I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I'm dead."
- Former officer Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on Floyd's neck for over eight minutes, told Floyd, "Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk."
Read the transcripts via DocumentCloud.