Are State Attorneys General Attacking Climate Change Critics Engaging in a Conspiracy?
Glenn Reynolds, the law professor behind Instapundit.com thinks so.
Glenn Reynolds, who teaches law at the University of Tennessee and runs Instapundit.com, suggests in USA Today that the subpoeana aimed at the Competitive Enterprise Institute related to climate change may be evidence of an illegal conspiracy among state-level attorneys general:
Federal law makes it a felony "for two or more persons to agree together to injure, threaten, or intimidate a person in any state, territory or district in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him/her by the Constitution or the laws of the Unites States, (or because of his/her having exercised the same)."
I wonder if U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker, or California Attorney General Kamala Harris, or New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman have read this federal statute. Because what they're doing looks like a concerted scheme to restrict the First Amendment free speech rights of people they don't agree with. They should look up 18 U.S.C. Sec. 241, I am sure they each have it somewhere in their offices.
Here's what's happened so far. First, Schneiderman and reportedly Harris sought to investigate Exxon in part for making donations to groups and funding research by individuals who think "climate change" is either a hoax, or not a problem to the extent that people like Harris and Schneiderman say it is.
This investigation, which smacks of Wisconsin's discredited Putin-style legal assault on conservative groups and their contributors, was denounced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Hans Bader as unconstitutional….
Here's what happened next: After Bader's critique, Walker, the U.S. Virgin Islands attorney general, subpoenaed the Competitive Enterprise Institute's donor lists. The purpose of this subpoena is, it seems quite clear, to punish CEI by making people less willing to donate.