People walk past the U.S. Supreme Court the day the court is set to release orders and opinions in Washington, U.S., June 1, 2021.
Erin Scott | Reuters
The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a California rule requiring nonprofits to disclose the names and addresses of their largest donors, delivering a victory to a pair of conservative groups that had challenged the requirement as unconstitutional.
The 6-3 decision, which divided the nine justices along ideological lines, reversed a 2018 appeals court ruling siding with California’s attorney general.
The rule had forced nonprofits to give the state their so-called Schedule B forms, which include the personal information of all donors nationwide who had contributed more than $5,000 in a given tax year. The state had argued that it needed that information to help it police misconduct by charities.
“We do not doubt that California has an important interest in preventing wrongdoing by charitable organizations,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion.
But “there is a dramatic mismatch” between “the interest that the Attorney General seeks to promote and the disclosure regime that he has implemented in service of that end,” Roberts wrote.
In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that the majority’s decision bodes ill for requiring regulated organizations to follow the rules.
“Today’s analysis marks reporting and disclosure requirements with a bull’s-eye,” Sotomayor wrote. “Regulated entities who wish to avoid their obligations can do so by vaguely waving toward First Amendment ‘privacy concerns.'”
“Neither precedent nor common sense supports such a result,” Sotomayor wrote.
Two conservative groups — Americans for Prosperity, the influential advocacy group funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, and the Michigan-based Thomas More Law Center, which has actively engaged in hot-button cultural arenas — had both challenged the disclosure rule in lawsuits against then-Attorney General Kamala Harris.
Those groups argued that California’s disclosure requirement violated the Constitution’s protections of free speech and free association.
U.S. District Court Judge Manuel Real in 2016 agreed, ruling that the provision “chills the exercise of its donor’s First Amendment freedoms to speak anonymously and to engage in expressive association.”
But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed the district court judgments, noting that the donor information was being collected “solely for nonpublic use, and the risk of inadvertent public disclosure was slight.”
Xavier Becerra succeeded Harris in the role after she became a U.S. senator. The state’s current attorney general is Rob Bonta.
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