Freedom Line Blog

Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.” Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 CDT/5:00 pm EDT: Rachel del Guidice, Reporter for The Daily Signal: Trump/Putin and Haley/UN;

4:15 CDT/5:15 pm EDT: Cleta Mitchell, Parker and Political Law Attorney at Foley & Lardner: IRS and Schedule B Disclosure;

4:30 CDT/5:30 pm EDT: Phil Kerpen, President of American Commitment: Soda Tax;

4:45 CDT/5:45 pm EDT: Bryan Riley, Director of National Taxpayer’s Union’s Free Trade Initiative: Tariffs and NAFTA;

5:00 CDT/6:00 pm EDT: Roslyn Layton, Visiting Scholar with American Enterprise Institute: Net Neutrality, CRA and Privacy Concerns; and

5:30 CDT/6:30 pm EDT: William J. Conti, Partner with Baker & Hostetler: Judge Kavanaugh and Midterm Elections.

Listen live on the Internet here. Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.

ALEXANDRIA, VA – In welcome news, the U.S. Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) announced yesterday evening that the IRS will finally cease requiring certain nonprofit organizations to file “Schedule B” forms that list sensitive personal information like the names, addresses and other identifying information about private citizens who donate to those organizations.

In response, Center for Individual Freedom (“CFIF”) President Jeffrey Mazzella issued the following statement:

“As many Americans are all too aware, recent years have witnessed an increase in assaults against our First Amendment freedoms of speech and association.  In some cases, the IRS has collected and leaked private information on contributors to 501(c) nonprofit organizations contained in mandatory Schedule B forms that by law were to remain confidential.  And across America, hyper-partisan government state-level officials have demanded Schedule B forms and confidential donor information contained therein as part of their campaign to harass organizations and donors with whom they disagree politically.

“With this announcement, the IRS and Treasury are acting on the acknowledgment that Schedule B information is irrelevant to its handling of tax filings, and serves no substantive purpose. In this era of persecution of private citizens for their political beliefs, together with the IRS’s admission that it can’t guarantee the confidentiality of the information contained on the Schedule B, this decision is welcome news.

“We at CFIF applaud the Trump Administration Treasury Department and IRS for their leadership and doing the right thing by eliminating the Schedule B form filing requirement for many nonprofit 501(c) organizations.”

CFIF has spearheaded the broad conservative and libertarian coalition to eliminate the Schedule B from filing requirement, including, among other efforts, coordinating a letter to President Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin earlier this year signed by more than 60 influential organizations and individuals urging executive action to accomplish that end.

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Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.” Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 CDT/5:00 pm EDT: Peter Murphy, Vice President for Policy at the Invest in Education Foundation:

4:15 CDT/5:15 pm EDT: Michael Tanner, Cato Institute Senior Fellow: America’s Growing Entitlement Crisis;

4:30 CDT/5:30 pm EDT: Quin Hillyer, Contributing Editor of National Review Magazine, Senior Editor for The American Spectator Magazine, and Nationally Recognized Authority on the American Political Process: Conservatism Just Ain’t What It Used to Be;

5:00 CDT/6:00 pm EDT: Andrew Moylan, Executive Vice President of the National Taxpayers Union Foundation: SCOTUS and Internet Taxation;

5:15 CDT/6:15 pm EDT: Ryan Radi, Research Fellow and Regulatory Counsel: AT&T/Time Warner Merger; and

5:30 CDT/6:30 pm EDT: William J. Conti, Partner at Baker & Hostetler: Immigration and FBI IG Report.

Listen live on the Internet here. Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.

The Center for Individual Freedom applauds Senator Mike Lee on the introduction of the SMARTER Act of 2018.  Among other improvements, this bill includes key reforms to the flawed Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC’s) merger review process, including:  1) establishing a reasonable time limit for agency review to ensure fairer, more transparent and timely decisions, and 2) ending the ability to effectively kill transactions by designating them for hearing before Administrative Law Judges, instead requiring such cases to be litigated in federal court just as the Justice Department must when contesting proposed transactions.

CFIF urges quick Senate passage of the commonsense legislation.

Where’s Google?

That’s the question asked by Timothy Lee, CFIF’s Senior Vice President of Legal and Public Affairs, in an op-ed published by The Hill in the lead up to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s much-anticipated testimony before Congressional committees this week.

While Facebook understandably is dominating the news, Lee wrote, “Google’s data practices are perhaps even more troubling.”

Lee goes on to suggest that its time for all internet platforms, including Facebook, Google and others, to stop eschewing accountability:

As a threshold matter, platforms must accept that they play an important role in addressing the harms they enable. To date, their voluntary measures have fallen far short, largely consisting of asking outside groups like Wikipedia or Snopes.com to referee their problems. But non-profit encyclopedias and fact-checkers simply aren’t equipped to solve these problems, particularly those who might possess their own biases and motives. Platforms themselves can and should do far more to address illegal and illicit conduct they facilitate.

The internet has changed the way we communicate, conduct commerce and entertain ourselves. Growing concerns about the ease with which bad actors exploit it, however, undermines consumer confidence and erodes public trust. By eschewing accountability, dominant online platforms contribute to that downward spiral.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.” Today’s guest lineup includes:

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.” Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 CDT/5:00 pm EDT: Glenn Lammi, Chief Counsel, Washington Legal Foundation Legal Studies Division: Food-Labeling Class Action Lawsuits and FDA’s Return to National Regulation of Consumer Products;

4:15 CDT/5:15 pm EDT: Peter Cove, Advocate for Private Solutions to Welfare Dependency and Author of “Poor No More”: Why Entitlement Programs Should Have a Work Component;

4:30 CDT/5:30 pm EDT: Representative Francis Rooney (R-FL): Offshore Drilling in the Gulf of Mexico Not a Fit for Florida;

4:45 CDT/5:45 pm EDT: Robert J. Smith, Distinguished Fellow, Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute: Federal Land Use and the Antiquities Act;

5:00 CDT/6:00 pm EDT: James Phillips, Senior Research Fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at The Heritage Foundation: Trump’s Decision on Jerusalem;

5:15 CDT/6:15 pm EDT: Cleta Mitchell, Partner, Foley & Lardner LLP: Donor Privacy from Government Abuse; and

5:30 CDT/6:30 pm EDT: Sally Pipes, President and CEO, Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy at the Pacific Research Institute: HHS Nominee Alex Azar.

Listen live on the Internet here. Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.

Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.” Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 CDT/5:00 pm EDT: John Berlau, Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute: Mortgage Bailouts;

4:15 CDT/5:15 pm EDT: Edward Whalen, President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center: The Constitution, The Courts and The Culture;

4:30 CDT/5:30 pm EDT: Emily Ekins, Research Fellow and Direct of Polling at the Cato Institute: Cato’s 2017 Free Speech & Tolerance Survey;

4:45 CDT/5:45 pm EDT: Karlyn Bowman, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute: The American Family in the Age of Trump;

5:00 CDT/6:00 pm EDT: Quin Hillyer, Contributing Editor of National Review Magazine, a Senior Editor for The American Spectator magazine and Political Analyst: Fallout from Roy Moore Controversy;

5:15 CDT/6:15 pm EDT: Robert B. Bluey, Senior Vice President Communications and Editor in Chief, The Daily Signal at The Heritage Foundation: Government Regulation and Social Media; and

5:30 CDT/6:30 pm EDT: William J. Conti, Partner at Baker & Hostetler: Recent Elections and Implications for 2018 and 2020.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.