Texas Public Policy Foundation: Refusing to Cower

The Texas Public Policy Foundation has long been a target for the left.  The IRS has leaked their donor list.  Last week, the leftist London Guardian published private details of TPPF's latest Medicaid proposal.  Today, TPPF came out swinging:

But the real purpose of the Guardian’s hit piece is far more disturbing than any corporatist conspiracy theory: It is meant to undermine the freedoms of expression and association that all Americans enjoy under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The Guardian is well aware of these protections; they are why the paper has been able to publish many of the documents stolen by Edward Snowden. But for the activist Left, those freedoms shouldn’t extend to conservative and libertarian groups. 

The Guardian’s aim is to intimidate Americans who support the work of liberty-minded organizations. They seek to deter them by falsely suggesting wrongdoing –;as they did to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) last year — and by stripping donors and supporters of their constitutional right to anonymity. That right was expressly recognized in a 1958 U.S. Supreme Court case, NAACP v. Alabama, in which the court affirmed that “freedom to engage in association for the advancement of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of the ‘liberty’ assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

But the Guardian story is not an isolated incident. It is part of a deliberate, coordinated effort across the political left to silence Americans who speak against — and lawfully resist — the growth of government power. 

.... 

Elected officials are also piling on. U.S. senator Elizabeth Warren’s letter to Wall Street CEOs last week demanding disclosure of financial contributions to Washington think tanks is as blatant an effort to suppress political speech as her Senate colleague Dick Durbin’s August letter to supporters of ALEC demanding their positions on stand-your-ground legislation.

Even tax-exempt nonprofits on the left have joined the fray. In November, the liberal Center for Media and Democracy launched a campaign to reveal the identities of anonymous donors to conservative groups in last year’s effort to unseat Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. It also filed a records request demanding every e-mail the Texas legislature had received from the Texas Public Policy Foundation. 

.... 

But they will not deter us, our peer institutions in the State Policy Network, or the American majority that still believes in constitutional liberties. When their efforts to slander and intimidate have failed, all that will remain for them is to contend on the merits of their ideas.

And we know how desperately the Left wants to avoid that.

 Good for TPPF; read the whole thing here.

-----

On another note, the full Guardian piece is an astonishing non-troversey; we recommend readers read the whole thing here.