Dark Side of the Left’s Move to Ban ‘Dark Money’

(This article first appeared in Real Clear Pennsylvania.)

In the mid-1950s, when Jim Crow laws reigned in Alabama, state attorney general John M. Patterson – later a Ku Klux Klan-supported governor – filed a lawsuit against the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The suit alleged that the NAACP was violating a state statute concerning the registration of out-of-state corporations. In reality, the legal action was a thinly veiled attempt to cripple the NAACP by revealing its roster of supporters’ names and addresses to the government and the public.

Unwilling to expose its supporters to harassment, violence, or worse by the likes of the KKK, the NAACP refused.

The case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in 1958, ruled unanimously in favor of donor privacy. The court wrote: “Inviolability of privacy in group association may in many circumstances be indispensable to preservation of freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs.”

Now, Pennsylvania lawmakers want to strip Americans of these constitutional rights and effectively overturn NAACP v. Alabama.

Read the complete article HERE:  The Dark Side of the Left’s Move to Ban ‘Dark Money’ | RealClearPennsylvania