I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Attorney General Gary King said over the weekend that he’ll ask a federal appellate court to overturn a federal court ruling that New Mexico can’t require nonprofits to disclose their donors.
“We will ask the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn the District Court because we feel the U.S. Supreme Court has raised some important concepts that have a bearing upon States’ rights to require organizations to disclose who is paying for political ads that are put forth by these same organizations,” King said in a press release issued Saturday.
The Aug. 3 ruling by federal judge Judith Herrera that King wants overturned said that the state had incorrectly demanded that New Mexico Youth Organized and the SouthWest Organizing Project register with the state as political committees. The effect of such an action would have been that the two nonprofit organizations would have had to disclose their donors. Federal law oversees nonprofits and does not requite them to disclose the vast majority of their donors.
King’s office maintains that the two nonprofits stepped over a line between educating voters, which nonprofits can do, into electioneering, that is, injecting themselves into an election, which nonprofits cannot do. The state says the nonprofits did that with mailers they paid for that were critical of state lawmakers.
Herrera ruled that the state of New Mexico had not proved that the nonprofits had stepped over the line. The judge found that the mailings were not “unambiguously campaign-related using a complicated analysis touching on several U.S. Supreme Court rulings. Therefore, she wrote, the nonprofits were not subject to a state law that would have required the nonprofits to register as a political committee.
But King in his press release issued this weekend said, “This case has never been about the First Amendment, despite misinformation to the contrary. We are not trying to control the content of political ads. We believe, however, that the case has everything to do with voters’ having the right to know who is paying for political advertising.”
UPDATE: The Attorney General told Peter St. Cyr of his intentions on Saturday. You can listen to the audio here.
