WASHINGTON, July 1, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Thursday that California violated the U.S. Constitution by requiring nonprofits to reveal the names of major donors.
California wanted charities to submit their IRS 990 Schedule B forms to the state in the name of “critical law enforcement purposes,” claiming the records will remain private. A coalition of organizations crossing ideological lines — including Americans for Prosperity Foundation, Thomas More Law Center, American Civil Liberties Union, NAACP, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Southern Poverty Law Center, Human Rights Campaign, and Council on American-Islamic Relations — argued the law violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of association by creating a “chilling effect” on political donations.
“We do not doubt that California has an important interest in preventing wrongdoing by charitable organizations,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority opinion, agreed to by all the Court’s Republican appointees. “There is a dramatic mismatch, however, between the interest that the Attorney General seeks to promote and the disclosure regime that he has implemented in service of that end.” He added that “assurances of confidentiality may reduce the burden of disclosure to the State, [but] they do not eliminate it.”
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