Kamala Harris, Dem Rising Star, Goes for the Jugular on Conservative Nonprofits

From the American Thinker Blog:

The Supreme Court is being asked to determine whether California’s ambitious Attorney General and candidate for U.S. Senate, Kamala Harris, has violated the First Amendment and federal law protecting confidential tax return information.
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Nonprofit organizations are some of the most effective critics of government, other powerful institutions -- and ambitious politicians -- making them especially vulnerable to the desire to bully and censor them. The Lois Lerner/IRS scandal is a good example.

Harris decided to push the limits by telling charities that they may not solicit contributions unless they first file a list of their top donors, which is an extortionate prior restraint on speech. Those donors are found on a confidential “Schedule B” to the tax returns filed by nonprofits with the IRS.

Federal law protects confidential tax return information, and even provides civil and criminal penalties against federal and state officials who violate the confidentiality law.  The IRS was ordered to pay the National Organization for Marriage for disclosing that organization’s Schedule B donor information to hostile blogs.

As or even more importantly, what Harris is doing flies in the face of the 1958 landmark Supreme Court decision in NAACP v. Alabama. That case held that membership lists are protected by the First Amendment from demands of states and their attorneys general.

The CEO of Mozilla was driven from his position when news of his personal support for Prop. 8 was released. The Left has been using "lawfare" against their political opponents.

If you can't beat them at the ballot box, find a sympathetic judge and convince one judge, not the electorate.

Can you name one liberal policy, before Obamacare, that succeeded by using the legislative Process?

Abortion?

Busing?

Student Takes His School To The Cleaners For $900k

From The Daily Caller:

A student expelled from a public college for dubious reasons has been vindicated, and has picked up a cool $900,000 in the process.

Way back in 2007, Hayden Barnes was a student at Georgia’s Valdosta State University. The school at the time was planning to build two new parking garages on campus, and Barnes was strongly opposed. So, Barnes expressed his frustration on social media, posting an image collage to Facebook that, among other things, included a picture of Valdosta’s then-president Ronald Zaccari.

Zaccari promptly flew off the handle, labeling the collage a “threatening document” because it dubbed one of the garages the “Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage” (Zaccari said the name implied a threat to murder him). Declaring that Barnes was an imminent threat to both Valdosta at large and Zaccari’s own personal safety, the president unilaterally expelled him without even holding a hearing.

Since then, Barnes graduated from a different college, got a law degree, got married and had a kid. But he remained convinced that his expulsion from Valdosta was a grave wrong, and was determined to be vindicated in the courts. His initial lawsuit against the school transformed into a bruising seven-year legal battle.

This kid needs to be hired by the law firm that's going after Universities, which are improperly expelling male students for "sexual assault" without due process. This kids is going bankrupt many schools.

Lawsuit spells out 'nightmare' for California man accused without evidence

From Ashe Schow of The Washington Examiner:

"Nightmare." That's how Scott Hounsell, the former executive director of the Republican Party of Los Angeles County, describes the ordeal he went through two years ago, and is still trying to recover from today.

"It was the most — the scariest, most devastating nightmare you could ever imagine ever going through ever," Hounsell added. "Because everything that you have and hold dear — my family, my career, everything — was threatened that it would be taken away from me."
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The arrest

On July 1, 2013, a Democratic former assemblyman named Mike Feuer became L.A. City Attorney. When the Los Angeles County District Attorney declined to press charges against Hounsell on July 30, Feuer seized the case. Officer Good contacted Hounsell again to find out his attorney's information. Members of the press began calling Hounsell, his family and his employer to discuss charges Hounsell wasn't even aware of yet.

The media circus that ensued — complete with news cameras camping outside his family home for days — made Hounsell believe this was in part motivated by political harassment. "The City originally wanted to take me into custody at my house, where the press was heading," he said. "When I showed up downtown to turn myself in, it sent everyone for a scramble, and they couldn't get cameras there in time."
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When the city attorney finally dropped the charges May 14 — nine months after Hounsell's arrest — the reason cited was "no victim" and "no forensics." The alleged victim had refused to testify, and there was still no evidence of any Facebook contact between Hounsell and Jane Doe.

The lawsuit

By then, Hounsell had obviously been forced to resign from the Republican Party of Los Angeles County. He had to take up odd jobs to support his family. His name was mud.

On Nov. 19, 2014, he sued the L.A. city attorney for defamation, false arrest, malicious prosecution and violation of his 14th Amendment rights. He sought $3.6 million for reputation management (including $24,879 per month for two years to clean up his Google search results), lost wages, career damage and $500,000 for emotional distress.

On April 9, 2015, Judge Margaret Morrow dismissed his claim based on prosecutors' arguments that they enjoy absolute immunity, but provided Hounsell with a leave to amend so that he can challenge whether immunity applies in this case.

"[T]he LACA enjoys absolute immunity for deciding to file charges against Hounsell, whether or not it adequately investigated the facts of the case, adequately determined the statutes under which it should file charges, or adequately reviewed and/or disclosed allegedly exculpatory evidence," Morrow wrote in her dismissal.

If that's the case, Hounsell told the Examiner, then "The most powerful job in this country then is prosecutor, because the Constitution doesn't apply to you."
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Hounsell and his attorney say that if the judge rules in the city's favor, it "will set a dangerous federal precedent that prosecutors can use their office for reasons to exact revenge and punishment upon political enemies." The city attorney, after all, knew for months that there were no Facebook messages, yet dragged out the case anyway.

This is another example of Liberals using "lawfare" against political enemies, similar to the Joe Dow investigations in Wisconsin.

Time to remove the "absolute immunity" prosecutors have and change it to "qualified immunity." If there is no thread of consequences,