Gun rights, anti-abortion groups challenge Minnesota lobbying disclosure rules

MINNEAPOLIS — A pair of controversial right-wing advocacy groups are challenging Minnesota lobbying laws that require organizations to disclose spending meant to urge individuals to influence lawmakers, arguing they chill free speech.

Minnesota Right to Life and Minnesota Gun Rights — both run by executive director Ben Dorr — filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota earlier this month, arguing the state’s grassroots lobbying requirements violate the First Amendment. The lawsuit says the state doesn’t have a sufficiently important interest in requiring the disclosures.

State rules require that when an organization or individual spends more than $2,000 on paid advertising to rally public support and influence lawmakers, it must disclose the spending and any specific subjects addressed by the advertising. The state refers to it as “grassroots lobbying.” Similar requirements exist for spending on election campaigns or political advertising.

“There’s certainly no right to have that kind of information,” Brett Nolan, an attorney for the Institute for Free Speech, said of the disclosures required for grassroots lobbying, “but what we do have is a right to speak and to speak about political issues.”

Nolan said in an interview the disclosure requirements keep groups that may have controversial opinions from getting their message out and hand over their identities to people who may target them for harassment.

“The real question is why do the people and the government have an interest in knowing who is speaking?” Nolan said. “Why do they need to know who is sending out a flyer, who’s running an ad?”

The Institute for Free Speech is representing Minnesota Right to Life and Minnesota Gun Rights in the case. The nonprofit has worked on other high-profile cases challenging campaign finance laws.

Dorr and his group have faced criticism from other gun rights groups that say their operation takes donations but does little work to advance legislation or causes at the state level.

Minnesota Gun Rights’ website advertises themselves as the state’s only “no compromise” gun group. The group has run afoul of state and federal filing requirements before. It had its tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service revoked in 2016 and later reinstated. Both it and Minnesota Right to Life have seen their registrations with the Minnesota Secretary of State’s Office dissolved and reinstated twice.

Craig Holman, a lobbyist focused on ethics and campaign finance for Public Citizen, said the strategy of urging members of the public to contact their legislators is a “far more effective influence-peddling tool” than hiring a lobbyist to contact lawmakers. Well-financed groups, he said, can even place television commercials to get voters to apply public pressure to their elected officials.

“They’re paying to try to influence the Legislature,” he said, “and the Legislature has every right to know that is going on here and that it isn’t a genuine public outcry; it’s actually a lobby campaign.”

Minnesota Right to Life and Minnesota Gun Rights’ lawsuit claims the disclosure requirements open Dorr and vendors that serve his organization to harassment and threats.

It says Dorr experienced online threats several years ago. A mailbox vendor Minnesota Right to Life used for a mail outreach campaign in 2020 stopped working with the organization after activists called the business and showed up to demand it stop working with the advocacy organization, the lawsuit says.

The two groups are under pressure from the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board, according to the lawsuit, as one of its top officials sent the groups a letter in April warning they could face penalties for failing to disclose information about their spending in 2024.

The lawsuit says Minnesota Gun Rights met the $2,000 reporting threshold at least eight times through direct-mail advertising campaigns about pending legislation. Minnesota Right to Life met the threshold at least a dozen times. Combined, that’s at least $40,000 in spending in 2024.

“Plaintiffs thus face an impossible set of choices: limit their own protected speech to avoid disclosure, disclose private information that could subject themselves or their vendors to harassment, pay civil penalties for failing to file, or even face criminal penalties for filing a report that omits information about their vendors and grassroots advocacy,” the lawsuit says.

Jeff Sigurdson, executive director, directed questions about the case to Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office, as it represents state agencies in lawsuits. A spokesman for Ellison said the state would respond to the lawsuit in court.

The lawsuit predates the assassination of Minnesota House DFL Leader Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark and the attempted killings of Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette. But the the Institute for Free Speech issued a press release about the case after the shootings, saying they highlight the risks associated with the disclosure requirements.

David Schultz, a Hamline University political science and legal studies professor, said he did not think the case sufficiently proved the burden on the organizations’ outweighed the public interest in knowing who’s influencing the government.

“Ultimately, this is money being expended for the purposes of trying to influence public opinion and public policy,” Schultz said, “and you could make a good argument to say that the public still has a right to know who’s trying to expend that money.”

But, Schultz said, the current members of the U.S. Supreme Court could sympathize with the idea. Schultz said in the last decade, primarily conservative groups have chipped away at campaign finance and lobbying disclosure rules.

“In some sense,” Schultz said, “this lawsuit is part of this long battle against campaign finance regulation, against disclosure laws.”

--------------