http://themilitant.com/2017/8118/811802.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 18 May 8, 2017
(front page)
SWP will keep right on campaigning across US
BY JOHN STUDER
WASHINGTON, D.C. — “The SWP will continue to actively engage in
politics, including running candidates within the law and in ways that
maximize protections for contributors and supporters,” Alyson Kennedy,
Socialist Workers Party 2016 candidate for U.S. president, told the
press here April 20.
Kennedy was responding to the Federal Election Commission’s refusal to
extend the party’s exemption from having to report the names of
contributors who give over $200 to its election campaigns. The Socialist
Workers Party, she said, is “running mayoral candidates in New York
City, Albany, Seattle, and elsewhere this year. We’re taking our
program, the Militant newsweekly, and books and pamphlets to workers and
youth open to a working-class alternative to capitalist rule.”
At a hearing, the SWP won the vote of a majority of FEC members to
retain its exemption. Along straight party lines, the commissioners
voted 3-2, with Republican appointees backing the SWP’s exemption and
Democratic appointees opposed. Four votes were needed to grant the
extension, however.
The FEC decision “is a blow to working people and constitutional
rights,” Kennedy said in the FEC hearing room. “But the FEC decision
won’t change what the Socialist Workers Party does.”
Kennedy attended the hearing, along with the party’s attorney Lindsey
Frank, from the firm of Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky and
Lieberman, SWP national campaign organizer John Studer and Steve Clark,
a member of the party’s National Committee.
From the origins of the communist movement in the United States in
1919, the course of the SWP and its forerunners has been intertwined
with the history of working-class struggle — in labor battles,
opposition to Washington’s imperialist wars, the fight for Black rights,
the struggle to win and defend women’s right to choose abortion, battles
against deportations of immigrant workers, including its own members,
and much more. It has explained the need for the working class and its
allies to break from the bosses’ two-party system and chart a
revolutionary course toward workers power.
All this has put the party in the gunsights of federal, state and local
cops and spies from the outset.
From 1973 to 1987, the SWP conducted a successful 15-year-long
political campaign and lawsuit against FBI and other federal government
spying and disruption. This forced out many facts about the scope of
government disruption efforts. Federal police agencies had amassed over
8 million documents on party members and activities, carried out at
least 204 burglaries of SWP offices from 1960 to 1976 and paid some
1,300 informers to spy on the party.
This documented record was a powerful weapon in the SWP’s fight to win
exemption from reporting names of contributors. Every time the FEC has
reviewed the exemption, including this one, the party has submitted
evidence of ongoing harassment of party members by the government,
employers and rightist thugs.
FEC debate
Both the evidence and legal precedents — most of which result from
battles waged by the SWP — support extending the party’s exemption, said
attorney Lindsey Frank at the hearing. “To do otherwise would set a new,
overly harsh burden on anyone applying for exemption in the future.”
“If not the SWP, then who?” agreed Republican Commissioner Caroline Hunter.
Commissioner Lee Goodman, also a Republican, described prior attacks on
people’s constitutional right to refuse to report the names of political
associates. He recalled the victimization of Monthly Review editor Paul
Sweezy in New Hampshire, as well as screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in
Hollywood.
Goodman also pointed to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1964 decision rejecting
as unconstitutional efforts by the state of Alabama to force the NAACP
there to make public the names of its members, at a time of lynchings
and brutal assaults on fighters against Jim Crow segregation. The
victory in NAACP v. Alabama has been a foundation of the SWP’s fight
against disclosure since the 1970s.
“Do people still worry they can face harassment if they associate with
the SWP today?” Goodman asked.
Those days are long gone, said FEC Chairman Steven Walther, a Democratic
appointee who has voted against the SWP exemption twice before. It’s his
“impression,” Walther said, that Democratic primary contender Bernie
Sanders’ ties to socialism “slid into the electorate easily.” The
“tenets” of the SWP and Sanders are much the same, he said.
“The SWP has a completely different outlook and activity,” Frank
replied. “They are for dissolution of the capitalist system, the
establishment of a workers government. They point to the example of the
Cuban Revolution. Their views are contrary to Senator Sanders.”
But aren’t they really sliding toward each other, Walther pressed. “How
are your ‘tenets’ different?”
“It isn’t an issue of ‘tenets,’” Frank said. The SWP “has a unique
political position ‘outside the mainstream,’ it meets all the legal
requirements for an exemption.”
“Well, what leads party supporters to fear government reprisal?” Walther
asked.
“The SWP has a record of facing more than 70 years of reprisals,
something well known in this country,” Frank said. He pointed to
documented reports that movements the SWP is active in today, such as
fights against police brutality and to defend immigrants’ rights, have
been targets of police spying and interference.
“But these reports don’t mention the SWP,” Walther said.
“Yes, not so far. But think for a second,” Frank responded. “It took a
15-year lawsuit and political fight for the SWP to force out evidence
from decades of covert FBI spying and disruption. Must they do that
again each time they apply to extend their exemption? That’s one reason
Supreme Court rulings clearly say minor parties need only a low
threshold of evidence to win exemption.”
“That’s right,” Hunter said. “We don’t need to delve into what level of
harassment is enough. The case law says you only have to meet a low
bar.” Matthew Petersen, the third Republican appointee, agreed, saying
court precedents require only “a reasonable probability.”
“Well, I’ve voted to grant the SWP an exemption two times,” Democrat
Ellen Weintraub said. “But I did so with misgivings. I’m a strong
supporter of disclosure. Now the evidence of harassment seems weaker.”
Attacks on political space
Frank noted another factor, one that served as his closing argument in a
third and final letter submitted to the FEC earlier that week.
“There is growing polarization in the U.S. today,” Frank said. “There
are attacks on political meetings like those at Berkeley and Middlebury.
These create an atmosphere where people are more likely to fear they
will face harassment if they don’t have ‘mainstream’ political views and
their political associations become known.”
Frank pointed to a document the party attached to its latest submission,
along with press coverage of recent attacks on free speech and political
rights. In an April 8 affidavit to the FEC, Stephen Gabosch wrote: “John
Doe informed me that, because of recent changes in the general political
situation for the worse, he had decided to stop contributing money to
the SWP. He said he has been particularly disturbed by recent violent
attacks on public speakers on several college campuses, such as
Middlebury, and especially in Berkeley.”
The SWP’s attorney added that there are also “numerous instances where
prison officials have denied copies of the Militant to inmate
subscribers because of hostility to the SWP’s ideas.”
When the SWP’s first exemption was affirmed by the Supreme Court in
1974, Weintraub said, Justice Thurgood Marshall pointed to evidence of
“threatening phone calls and hate mail, the burning of SWP literature,
the destruction of SWP members’ property, police harassment of a party
candidate, and the firing of shots at an SWP office,” as well as the
sacking of 22 SWP members from jobs due to their party membership.
“There’s nothing like that this time,” she said.
“Those were the facts then, but that isn’t the criteria set by that
Supreme Court case or by rulings since then,” Frank said. “You’re
arguing that you have to have lots of evidence of harassment to merit an
exemption, but that just isn’t what the decision says.” What’s more, he
added, the FEC itself affirmed ongoing government and private disruption
through 2013 in extending the party’s exemption that year, and the SWP
presented substantial evidence of continuing harassment in its 2016
petition.
“I plan to vote no,” Weintraub responded.
The polarization pointed to by the SWP’s attorney and underlined in its
most recent letter to the FEC is important, Goodman said. In answer to
Weintraub’s remark that a meeting being shut down on campus isn’t
evidence of harassment of the SWP, he replied that “the perception
created by such activity carries reasonable risk” that people
considering contributions to the party may fear what could happen if
their names become public.
Hunter moved the commission extend the SWP’s exemption. The majority
voted yes, 3-2. Weintraub moved the commission vote down the exemption.
The majority voted no, 3-2.
Related articles:
SWP: ‘The FEC decision won’t change what the SWP does’
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