The U.S. Supreme Court has decided that the state of California’s requirement to disclose donor information hinders the First Amendment rights of those who contribute to charitable organizations.
“This burden cannot be justified on the ground that the regime is narrowly tailored to investigating charitable wrongdoing, or that the State’s interest in administrative convenience is sufficiently important,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the July 1 opinion.
As previously reported in the Southern California Record, Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta is based on regulation imposed when current U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris was California's attorney general. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation and the Thomas More Law Center (TMLC) promptly sued.
“California’s requirement was draconian because the state cannot — and has not — ensured the privacy of federal tax documents even during the lawsuit itself,” said Timothy A. Snowball, litigation counsel for the Freedom Foundation, which submitted an amicus brief in support of The Americans for Prosperity Foundation and TMLC.
“In addition, there is no practical reason why every single charity in California needs to provide the state with the tax documents because the state itself admits most will never be used except when the state allows them to become public.”
More than 100,000 charities are currently registered statewide, according to the opinion, and the requirement which lead to the litigation is the disclosure of the names and addresses of donors who have contributed more than $5,000 in a particular tax year or whose donations make up more than 2% of an organization’s total contributions.
“The requirement is calculated to produce a deterrent for potential donors worried their information could fall into the hands of those with differing opinions — and a ready-made list of targets for retribution when it inevitably does,” Snowball told the Southern California Record.
SCOTUS further determined that the state’s interest is less in investigating fraud and more in the ease of administration.
“This interest, however, cannot justify the disclosure requirement,” wrote Justice Roberts. “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 Schedule Bs imposes on donors’ association rights."
While SCOTUS reversed and remanded the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal’s decision to uphold the trial court’s decision in favor of the state, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Stephen Breyer, and Justice Elena Kagan dissented.
Sotomayor wrote that SCOTUS greatly understated the importance to California of collecting information on charitable organizations’ top donors.
“The evidence shows that California’s confidential reporting requirement imposes trivial burdens on petitioners’ associational rights and plays a meaningful role in Section attorneys’ ability to identify and prosecute charities engaged in malfeasance,” she wrote in the dissenting opinion. “That is more than enough to satisfy the First Amendment here. Much of the Court’s tailoring analysis is categorically inappropriate under the correct standard of review.”