XPost: alt.politics.usa.constitution, alt.politics.guns, alt.california   
   XPost: sac.general   
   From: gp@dont-email.me   
      
   The state has no right to threaten financial institutions that   
   do business with the NRA.   
   Imagine the following scenario. Imagine the media response.   
      
   By October, the governor of Texas was fed up. A well-funded ten-   
   month campaign by Everytown for Gun Safety designed to   
   stigmatize gun ownership was causing support for gun rights to   
   measurably decline. Called “You afraid?” the campaign mocked men   
   and women who carried weapons to grocery stores or restaurants.   
   An associated “courage” campaign asked mothers to hand back   
   their carry licenses, and while most didn’t, the dozens who did   
   received international media attention.   
      
   Then, two weeks before Halloween, a gunman opened fire in a   
   Houston Walmart, and no one responded for nine agonizing minutes   
   until police arrived. This was Texas. The store wasn’t a gun-   
   free zone — yet not a single armed citizen was available to   
   intervene.   
      
   The governor was furious. In public comments, he blasted   
   Everytown, declaring — in no uncertain terms — that “gun-   
   controllers have no place in Texas. Because that’s not who we   
   are.” But words mean nothing without action, and the state of   
   Texas acted. The governor directed state regulators to “urge   
   insurers and bankers statewide to determine whether any   
   relationship they may have with Everytown or similar   
   organizations sends the wrong message to their clients and their   
   communities who often look to them for guidance and support.”   
      
   Regulators responded, issuing “guidance letters” directed at the   
   chief executive officers, or equivalents, of all Texas licensed   
   financial institutions and all insurers doing business in Texas.   
   The letters urged recipients to sever ties with Everytown and   
   other “gun controller organizations.” The letters went well   
   beyond a mere political exhortation and invoked the private   
   corporations’ “risk management” obligations and their   
   obligations to consider “reputational risks.”   
      
   State regulators began investigating Everytown’s business   
   transactions in the state and coerced key vendors into consent   
   decrees that not only punished allegedly unlawful activity but   
   banned those vendors from engaging in entirely lawful business   
   relationships with the gun-control organization. As state   
   regulators moved, other commercial entities backed away — ending   
   longstanding business relationships with Everytown.   
      
   Let me ask a simple question. If Texas acted like this — if it   
   used state financial regulators to issue warning letters to   
   institutions doing business with an organization unquestionably   
   engaged in constitutionally protected advocacy — do you think   
   for one moment that America’s mainstream media would remain   
   silent, or speak up mainly to chuckle at Everytown’s financial   
   predicament? Do you think for one moment that America’s leading   
   progressives wouldn’t sense an immediate threat to free speech?   
      
   Yet the scenario above is playing out today, in a different   
   state, with a different target. New York’s Andrew Cuomo is   
   engaging in a deliberate campaign to use state power to drive   
   the NRA out of business. It’s using a combination of consent   
   decrees and warning letters directed at financial institutions   
   to coerce them into cutting of business relationships with the   
   NRA.   
      
   Cuomo’s intentions aren’t hidden. He’s on a crusade. “If I could   
   have put the NRA out of business, I would have done it 20 years   
   ago,” he said earlier this week. He followed up with this pithy   
   statement: “I’m tired of hearing the politicians say, we’ll   
   remember them in our thoughts and prayers. If the NRA goes away,   
   I’ll remember the NRA in my thoughts and prayers.”   
      
   Clever. But when statements like this are accompanied by state   
   action, there’s another word that applies — unconstitutional.   
      
   New York’s lawyers argue that the state’s letters represent   
   nothing more than government speech. The NRA and the state are   
   engaged in nothing more than a frank exchange of ideas. But   
   while the government does have broad power to engage in its own   
   advocacy, that power has its limits. As the Second Circuit has   
   recognized, there is a difference between “permissible   
   expressions of personal opinion and implied threats to employ   
   coercive State power to stifle protected speech.” When “comments   
   of a government official can reasonably be interpreted as   
   intimating that some form of punishment or adverse regulatory   
   action will follow the failure to accede to the official’s   
   request,” a First Amendment claim exists.   
      
   It simply strains credulity to argue that a financial   
   regulator’s letter to the financial institutions it closely   
   regulates urging those institutions to consider “risk   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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