Today Politico Arena asks:

Can the DISCLOSE Act, with exemptions carved out for large special-interest groups, effectively rein in the influence of spending in campaigns?

My response:

In case you missed yesterday’s excellent Hill Briefing on the DISCLOSE Act and other recent developments in speech restrictions, next week I’ll be debating Citizens United and the future of campaign finance regulation. The event, cutely titled “Citizens United, Republic Divided; Campaign Finance Law After Citizens United,” takes place June 24 at noon at American University’s Washington School of Law, Room 401. That’s 4801 Massachusetts Ave. NW here in Washington. 

IJ’s Steve Simpson and I will be up against American U’s Jamie Raskin and Election Law Blog’s Rick Hasen (who has also blogged this notice). RSVP to Michael Vasquez at mv5786a@​student.​american.​edu so there’s enough lunch to go around.

For Cato’s take on the DISCLOSE Act, see John Samples’s latest podcast, blogpost, and op-ed. See also NRA board member Cleta Mitchell’s stunning op-ed about that organization’s cynical Faustian bargain. Finally, here’s the piece John and I published in January in the wake of the Citizens United decision.

Today the Supreme Court came down with its ruling in Stop the Beach Renourishment v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection, a case I previously blogged about here and here, and in which Cato filed a brief.

While the Court’s 8–0 ruling against the Florida oceanfront (now ocean-view) property owners was not the result we wanted, the part of the decision that was unanimously unfortunate turned on a narrow and probably mistaken interpretation of state property law. Much more importantly, the remainder of Justice Scalia’s opinion makes clear that judicial takings are just as much a violation of the Fifth Amendment as any other kind. “If a legislature or a court declares that what was once an established right of private property no longer exists,” Scalia writes for a four-justice plurality, “it has taken that property, no less than if the State had physically appropriated it or destroyed its value by regulation.” And the test for whether the government—any part of it—has committed a taking turns on “whether the property right allegedly taken was established.” 

Moreover, that the Court ultimately found no taking here should provide no succor to courts and other state actors who wish to abuse property rights in the future. The case could have easily swung the other way in a non-oceanfront circumstance or under a different state’s laws. Indeed, two justices (Kennedy and Sotomayor) said that federal courts can still police judicial takings—under a different name—by using the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, while the remaining two (Breyer and Ginsburg) decided to leave the question for another day. Nobody accepted outright the idea that courts cannot be held accountable for subverting property rights!

In short, state courts are now on notice that they violate long-held property rights at their peril.

Kyrgyz libertarians are leading a series of coordinated voluntary efforts to provide emergency aid to the victims of the vicious attacks of the last few days in their country and to promote peace throughout the nation and the region. I’ve been in regular touch with our friends there, and on Tuesday evening I talked to Central Asian Free Market Institute (CAFMI) Director Mirsulzhan Namazaliev by Skype, as he was interrupted by a stream of volunteers working late into the night in the CAFMI offices. He made their resolution clear:

“We are helping those who are suffering, but we are doing more. For me personally this is not only a fight for life. It is a fight for freedom. We don’t want to be ruled by any authoritarian Central Asian or Russian regimes that would exploit this awful violence. The violence we are suffering is a provocation designed to generate chaos and to overturn the chance for a constitutional regime. We will not stand for it. We want peace, we want freedom, and we want a lawful government.”

I was in Kyrgyzstan just last month to work with CAFMI and with the new acting minister of economic development, my friend Emil Umetaliev, a founding member of CAFMI’s board of directors. (CAFMI was founded by two Cato graduates, former Cato intern Seyitbek Usmanov and Cato University graduate Mirsulzhan Namazaliev.) There was guarded optimism about the country’s future, after the corrupt and increasingly authoritarian regime of Kurmanbek Bakiyev was ousted in an uprising after he tried to suppress demonstrations with deadly force. But there was also fear of Bakiyev’s machinations, especially after the revelation of a recorded cell phone conversation between his son, Maksim, and his brother Janybek (who had given the orders to shoot protesters in April), in which they clearly plot violence to derail a new constitutional process and regain power, even proposing how many “fighters” to hire, arming them with iron bars and other implements, and how much to pay them to launch attacks. The recording was chilling. And with the money they looted from the country, they found the thugs to launch attacks on both Uzbek and Kyrgyz villages, in order to spark revenge attacks. Their plans bore fruit this month, as hundreds were murdered, homes and businesses were burned, and between 80,000 and 100,000 people were made refugees.

As Namazaliev put it to me, “We will not stand for it.”

CAFMI’s staff and volunteers are almost all under 25. Few have backgrounds in defense or security. But they immediately put the talents they do have to work. CAFMI volunteers worked with others to solicit, gather, and deliver humanitarian assistance for the thousands of people – mainly mothers and children – who had been driven from their homes, and to create a message of communal peace – of Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Russians, Uighurs, Tajiks and others who were standing together for peace and against murder and hatred. They called together teams of computer experts, technological wizards, social networkers, and activists to build an umbrella coalition: “I Want Peace in Kyrgyzstan” –“Мен Қирғизистонда тинчлик бўлишини истайман!” in Uzbek, “Мен Кыргызстанга тынчтыкты каалайм!” in Kyrgyz, and “Я хочу мира в Кыргызстане!” in Russian.

The “I want Peace in Kyrgyzstan” campaign has five coordinated elements:

1. Use cell phones, databases, and the internet to organize volunteers effectively and to create and disseminate maps (using Google Maps and other techniques) to guide deliveries of aid to victims and to help people to avoid areas in turmoil, burning buildings, and road blocks and ambushes set up by thugs.
2. Create a modern campaign for peace in three languages (Kyrygz, Uzbek, and Russian) – with a brand, a logo, street graffiti, slogans, t‑shirts, stickers, leaflets, hand-written letters from children, radio interviews and public announcements, text messages, and other means to calm tensions and promote peace. Representatives of the various ethnic groups appear together to pledge peace and to build the rule of law and freedom together.
3. Combat disinformation and misinformation that might fuel ethnic hatred and violence, and respond rapidly to malicious rumors and hate campaigns before they bear their evil fruit.
4. Contain the spread of reprisals and hatred throughout Central Asia, by providing reliable information to media, helping to combat ethnic smears and suppress revenge attacks against minorities in other countries, and quickly rebutting calls in nearby countries for military intervention into Kyrgyzstan, which carries the very real danger of regional war.
5. Create a “Peace Room” (not a “War Room”) in CAFMI’s Bishkek offices to be open 24 hours a day to coordinate the collection and dissemination of information. Volunteers in the Peace Room utilize cell phones, social networking sites, twitter, text messages, phone trees, and more and monitor mass media constantly. The CAFMI office is now fully staffed with volunteers and working around the clock.

The young volunteers and staff of CAFMI are donating their time, risking their lives, and contributing their scarce resources, in a country with a per-capita income of about $2,100. If you’d like to stand with a group of very brave, very determined, and very committed libertarians to stop the violence in their country, provide emergency aid to the victims, avoid regional war, and lead the region to peace and freedom, you can send a tax-deductible donation to the Central Asian Free Market Institute (CAFMI) through the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, which has provided support to CAFMI. Please write to Erin.​Grant@​AtlasNetwork.​org and 100% of your donation will be dedicated to CAFMI’s work in Central Asia. Even small donations will help. It would be a decision you would not regret. (You can follow CAFMI’s work on their Facebook page and Namazaliev writes in Russian and in English on NewEura​sia​.net, Twitter, and other media. He covered the April uprising against Bakiyev’s authoritarian regime in The Independent and was quoted frequently by CNN and many other news organizations.)

Thursday night at 8 and midnight, John Stossel debates the war on drugs with Sean Hannity. Check it out on the Fox Business Network.

John’s other guests will include Jeffrey Miron of Harvard and Cato and Mary Anastasia O’Grady of the Wall Street Journal.

And for more Stossel, don’t miss last week’s classic episode on Milton Friedman and Free to Choose with Tom Palmer, Johan Norberg … and me.

Anthony Graber, the Maryland motorcyclist being prosecuted on state felony wiretapping charges for recording his traffic stop and posting the video on YouTube, is the subject of an article in today’s Washington Post. I have said (again and again) that this is a misreading of the Maryland wiretapping statute, which is not supposed provide grounds for prosecution where there is no “reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Graber was on the side of the highway, and the police officer asserting this expansive reading of the wiretap statute while making an arrest at the Preakness was in the middle of a large crowd. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in either of those places. The Post article provides the other side of the argument:

The attention the Graber case is receiving has surprised Harford prosecutor Joseph I. Cassilly, who said his office has prosecuted similar cases before, including one within the past year against the passenger of a car that was stopped during a drug investigation who started taping officers with a cellphone camera. Cassilly said he didn’t know the status of the case because the prosecutor handling it has been out sick.

“The question is: Is a police officer permitted to have a private conversation as part of their duty in responding to calls, or is everything a police officer does subject to being audio recorded?” Cassilly said.

Cassilly thinks officers should be able to consider their on-duty conversations to be private.

I disagree. The injustice of the Maryland wiretap law was demonstrated earlier this week when Rep. Bob Etheridge assaulted a student who asked him a question while recording the encounter. The students were lucky that they were in the District of Columbia.

If the scuffle had been in Maryland, Etheridge could have been prosecuted for misdemeanor assault (this remains true for D.C., but I am not aware of any charges that have been made). In contrast, the students would have been on the hook for a felony violation of the wiretap law for recording the event, another violation for posting the event on the internet, and an additional charge for possession of the device used to intercept the conversation. I’m not agreeing with that reading of the law, but that’s the interpretation being used to prosecute Anthony Graber.

Whatever your views on privacy are, that’s not justice.

The Heritage Foundation and National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) made a stir by announcing their joint report, Without Intent: How Congress is Eroding the Criminal Intent Requirement in Federal Law. The report highlights the growth of federal criminal provisions in the 109th Congress. Many criminal statutes are drafted without the traditional requirement of criminal intent. When there is no requirement that the government prove you “willfully” or “knowingly” broke the law, mistakes are treated the same as intentional criminality. Some laws are written so broadly that it is impossible for anyone to know what conduct is illegal. Criminal provisions are included in statutes that are never reviewed by the judiciary committees of either chamber of Congress.

The NACDL has a follow-up analysis of the financial regulatory reform currently being considered by Congress. The Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010 has passed both houses and is heading into committee.

This 1600-page bill does everything that the Without Intent report warned against. The “reckless disregard” intent requirement is imported from tort law in several provisions and many others have no mental state requirement at all. New bribery and mail/​wire fraud provisions are included where none are necessary. Bribery and fraud are already illegal.

Read the whole thing (direct .pdf link here).