Where Parkland parents and civil rights groups disagree over school shootings
And Democrats' dark money dilemma
I hope you all had nice Thanksgivings, and happy Hannukah to those who are celebrating!
The first story to share is more timely than I wanted. It’s on a little-known battle playing out in Congress over the role of ‘threat assessment’ in preventing school shootings. Threat assessment is a violence prevention strategy designed by the U.S. Secret Service, originally to protect the president and other public officials, but now the agency says it’s also “the best” way to prevent school shootings. In the school context it involves multidisciplinary teams, usually at least with a mental health counselor, a school administrator, and someone from law enforcement, and they work to assess whether students pose serious risks to themselves or the community. The model is embraced by parents of school shooting victims like from Parkland, Florida, but is hotly opposed by hundreds of leading national civil rights and disability rights groups, who say it will harm and traumatize students, further entrench police in schools, and detract from more positive solutions.
The leading academic researcher on threat assessments likened his civil rights critics to anti-vaxxers, telling me their objections “are causing harm to many children by undermining a safe and effective practice that protects them.”
It’s a sensitive story; I worked on it for several weeks in November, filed my rough draft on Monday, and then Tuesday afternoon the latest mass school shooting broke out in Michigan. You can read the Intercept story here.
The second piece, out in The American Prospect, has been in the works for a long time. It’s feature-length, and looks at the rise, and largely the embrace of undisclosed spending by Democrats and progressive groups in the decade since Citizens United. There’s a real-politik attitude towards all this, the most cited argument is that liberals cannot afford to “unilaterally disarm” when conservatives are pouring all they have into enacting their agenda. And there’s truth to that, but the logic can also be taken too far. Today it’s Democrats not Republicans who are spending more in anonymous political contributions. Democrats have even pioneered some new ways to shield funders that Republicans later adopted. And assuming campaigners will readily give up winning strategies down the line seems a mistake.
Democratic lawmakers are still nominally in support of bills to crack down on so-called dark money, but many of the party’s top donors certainly like being able to give freely without risk of protest or harm. I think many big donors still would donate if they had to disclose their names, but it’s unlikely they’ll easily give up the privacy they currently enjoy.
As a journalist I’m biased towards transparency and disclosure, but also a general matter, I just think it becomes very difficult to evaluate political messages if you don’t know who is behind writing them. We live in a world where we’re constantly inundated with ads from anodyne sounding groups, replete with nondescript websites that list no staff members, and no details on who funds them. But we’re also living in a world where there are so many other threats to democracy that calls for transparency and disclosure can seem unimportant, less urgent.
I wanted to learn what it means for donor transparency to largely be cast as a naïve demand. I wanted to understand why leading liberal groups defend a status quo where ads don’t have to disclose their donors unless the ads are specifically discussing candidates running for offices. I wanted to understand how billionaire donors like Hansjörg Wyss can donate hundreds of millions to entities that distribute funds to other progressive political advocacy groups, and directly to organizations like the Center for American Progress, but still say all of that is "nonpartisan" and none went toward “political campaigning.”
One troubling thing is that for the last 45 years, the courts have said financial transparency is basically the one campaign finance safeguard least likely to pose a First Amendment concern. (That was essentially their argument when they issued their Citizens United.) But now conservatives are turning their sights on financial disclosures as well. This past summer SCOTUS struck down a law requiring charities to disclose names and addresses of their major donors. "It’s open season on a lot of things we thought were settled,” one nonprofit tax expert, told me. He anticipates 990 tax forms to be the next major target for litigation.
Anyway there’s a lot more in the story, and hope you’ll give it a read.'
More to come soon!