The Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, that a California nonprofit donor disclosure law that Kamala Harris repeatedly defended was unconstitutional.
This morning, in the case of Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, Attorney General of California, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down California’s law requiring charitable organizations to disclose their donors, concluding the law “burdens donors’ First Amendment rights and is not narrowly tailored to an important government interest,” ruling 6 to 3 that the law is unconstitutional.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts noted:
The need for up-front collection is particularly dubious given that California—one of only three States to impose such a requirement, see id., at 420— did not rigorously enforce the disclosure obligation until 2010.
What kind of power-hungry lunatic became California attorney general in 2010? Oh, that one.
Roberts continued:
The District Court also found that California was unable to ensure the confidentiality of donors’ information. During the course of litigation, the Foundation identified nearly 2,000 confidential Schedule Bs that had been inadvertently posted to the Attorney General’s website, including dozens that were found the day before trial. One of the Foundation’s expert witnesses also discovered that he was able to access hundreds of thousands of confidential documents on the website simply by changing a digit in the URL. The court found after trial that “the amount of careless mistakes made by the Attorney General’s Registry is shocking.”
Man, what kind of bumbling state attorney general would accumulate that kind of embarrassing, incompetent record of releasing confidential information?
Roberts continued:
Given the amount and sensitivity of this information harvested by the State, one would expect Schedule B collection to form an integral part of California’s fraud detection efforts. It does not. To the contrary, the record amply supports the District Court’s finding that there was not “a single, concrete instance in which pre-investigation collection of a Schedule B did anything to advance the Attorney General’s investigative, regulatory or enforcement efforts.”
Wait, the state demanded the information but never used it in any fraud investigations? What state attorney general would go before a court offering such an implausible defense? Oh.
Finally, Roberts concluded that the state’s motivation for requiring the disclosure was primarily one of convenience, and that the state had dismissed the potential risks to donors who prefer to remain anonymous.
The disclosure requirement “creates an unnecessary risk of chilling” in violation of the First Amendment, Secretary of State of Md. v. Joseph H. Munson Co., 467 U. S. 947, 968 (1984), indiscriminately sweeping up the information of every major donor with reason to remain anonymous. The petitioners here, for example, introduced evidence that they and their supporters have been subjected to bomb threats, protests, stalking, and physical violence. App. in No. 19–251, at 256, 291–292. Such risks are heightened in the 21st century and seem to grow with each passing year, as “anyone with access to a computer [can] compile a wealth of information about” anyone else, including such sensitive details as a person’s home address or the school attended by his children. Reed, 561 U. S., at 208 (ALITO, J., concurring).
Now, what kind of state attorney general would spend the better part of the 2010s attempting to enforce such a transparently unconstitutional law, that subjected innocent people to threats?