A new Supreme Court case is calling into question the sincerity of corporate America’s reckoning with political giving. Many companies and trade groups say they are re-evaluating political donations after the riot in the Capitol, demanding accountability for lawmakers who challenged the electoral count. But in a matter accepted for review by the high court a few days after the mayhem, some of those organizations had argued for a constitutional right to anonymous charitable donations, a position that would make accountability more difficult. (It’s known as “dark money.”)
The case “nominally involves a tiny technical question” about the tax disclosures of charities’ major donors in California, wrote Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, in the National Law Journal. But it “could lock in dark money influence as a constitutional right,” he added, and it comes as “the country faces a dark-money crisis as anonymous influence spreads malicious disinformation and corrupts and disrupts our politics.” More than 20 “friends of the court briefs” supporting donor anonymity were filed, including from business groups….