In a time of rising political violence, privacy is essential to free speech. Privacy protects us from extremists bent on silencing opposing views by any means necessary. For generations, Americans on the right and the left have enjoyed the freedom to privately organize and speak about issues such as taxes, education, border control, and public safety.
Yet these rights face an increasingly powerful opponent: Vice President Kamala Harris. In her prior roles as a U.S. Senator and Attorney General for California, Harris repeatedly took aim at Americans’ privacy and First Amendment rights. If she becomes our next president, grassroots organizations representing traditional American values may soon find their donors under attack.
In California, Harris ordered every charitable organization in the state to submit unredacted copies of confidential IRS forms listing the names, addresses, and donation amounts of their supporters. Then, her office promptly leaked thousands of those forms online. It was not unlike the crimes of Charles Littlejohn, the convicted IRS contractor who leaked the tax returns of President Trump and other wealthy Americans. The only difference is that Harris’ actions were done with the authority and imprimatur of the California Attorney General’s office.
After the state’s misconduct was exposed, nonprofits on the right and the left cried foul. Conservative groups took Harris to court, yet many liberal nonprofits also supported them.
“The breaches of confidentiality here were massive,” explained the ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Human Rights Campaign, and other left-leaning nonprofits in a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Court ultimately found that the state did not even use the information it demanded: “Given the amount and sensitivity of this information harvested by the State, one would expect [donor list] 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 [donor list] did anything to advance the Attorney General’s investigative, regulatory or enforcement efforts,’” the Court observed.
Beyond the severe and needless privacy violations Harris created, her actions practically invited a rebuke from the Supreme Court. In 1958, the Justices had unanimously ruled that Americans have the right to keep their support for nonprofit organizations private from state officials. That civil rights era case, NAACP v. Alabama, was one of the first in a long line of decisions recognizing the critical importance of privacy in association to the First Amendment.
“It is hardly a novel perception that compelled disclosure of affiliation with groups engaged in advocacy may constitute as effective a restraint on freedom of association as [other forms of censorship],” the Court observed.
Few doubted that the conservative Roberts Court would uphold the NAACP ruling against Harris’ blanket demand for nonprofit donor lists. Yet, her office pushed ahead, threatening to suspend the registrations of groups that did not comply with her demands. Harris even threatened to issue fines to those groups’ directors and officers. Her aggressive tactics ultimately prompted nearly 300 nonprofits from across the ideological spectrum to file briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court opposing her demands.
As expected, a 6-3 decision handed down in summer 2021 ruled that Harris had violated the First Amendment.
“The Attorney General may well prefer to have every charity’s information close at hand, just in case. But ‘the prime objective of the First Amendment is not efficiency.’ Mere administrative convenience does not remotely ‘reflect the seriousness of the actual burden’ that the demand for [donor lists] imposes on donors’ association rights,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts.
Harris had long since moved on from the state Attorney General’s office by that time. The case was renamed for current California Attorney General, Rob Bonta. Yet the Court’s ruling in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta is fundamentally a rebuke of the overreach of Kamala Harris.
Upon arriving in the U.S. Senate in 2017, Harris continued her efforts to strip American citizens of the right to privately support nonprofits. On multiple occasions, Harris co-sponsored legislation that would force nonprofit advocacy groups to publicly disclose their donors. These proposals were later supported by the Biden administration where Harris serves as Vice President.
Harris rarely speaks about her role in the AFPF v. Bonta case or her support for anti-privacy legislation like the DISCLOSE Act. Her track record, however, is clear. Harris has consistently supported efforts to invade Americans’ privacy and force nonprofits to publicize their members’ names and home addresses. She has demonstrated a willingness to ignore unanimous Supreme Court precedents and the outcry of nonprofits across the spectrum in her pursuit of these goals.
Harris’ recent elevation within the Democratic Party marks her as one of the most consequential political figures of the current moment. On privacy and free speech, however, she has long been established as one of the most dangerous politicians in the country.
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