New York’s Gift to the NRA

America’s most distinguished civil rights group, the National Rifle Association, is having quite a volley of victories in the courts. A New York judge just rebuffed the effort by Attorney General Letitia James to impose a “monitor” on the NRA, which she’d earlier sought to dissolve, calling it a “terrorist organization.” The judge rejected that bid by General James. Plus, too, the NRA won a free speech victory courtesy of a unanimous Supreme Court.The thread that ties together these cases is the years-long effort by General James and Governor Andrew Cuomo to destroy the NRA and drive it from New York state. Their animus arises from the NRA’s role as a defender of the Second Amendment, which is, in its own right and in the words of St. George Tucker, “the true palladium of liberty.” The New York Democrats waged their own form of lawfare against the NRA, but they both came a cropper.The extent of their defeat came into focus Monday when Judge Joel Cohen ruled against General James’ demand for a monitor to supervise the NRA’s operations. It amounted to an “existential threat,” per the group’s ex-chief Wayne LaPierre. Judge Cohen decided, the AP says, that a monitor would be “time-consuming” and “disruptive” and be a “speech-chilling government intrusion on the affairs of the organization.” As for Mr. LaPierre, he was previously found liable to misspending the NRA’s spondulix on “lavish trips and other personal expenses,” the AP says. General James had sought to pin that abuse on the NRA itself, but a jury didn’t see it that way. Instead, Mr. LaPierre and another official were ordered to reimburse the NRA for the millions they misused. In other words, so far General James has accomplished little but, so to speak, raise money for the NRA.Judge Cohen on Monday barred Mr. LaPierre from holding a paid position with the group for 10 years. He emphasized the “privilege, not the right, to serve as an officer or director of a New York not-for-profit.” Considering the hostility shown by the Empire State’s top elected officials toward the NRA, though, we could imagine the group doubting the extent of that “privilege.” No wonder the NRA has considered reincorporating elsewhere. In any event, Judge Cohen’s ruling from the bench followed the ringing defense in March of the NRA’s First-Amendment rights by, of all people, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by all her colleagues on the nation’s highest court. That case, National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo, hinged on the effort by Mr. Cuomo and a state official, Maria Vullo, to in effect “financially blacklist” the NRA, the group said, and punish it for its Second Amendment advocacy.It was a backdoor attempt at censorship so brazen that even the American Civil Liberties Union was provoked, calling it a “critically important First Amendment fight.” Mr. Cuomo and Ms. Vullo sought to target “a nonprofit advocacy group and deny it access to financial services,” the ACLU said, for its “controversial viewpoint.” What’s to stop “officials in other states,” the ACLU asked, from trying to “punish other advocacy organizations in the same way”?“Government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors,” Justice Sotomayor avers in her opinion. The NRA “plausibly alleges that respondent Maria Vullo did just that,” she said. She decried the coordination between Mr. Cuomo, denouncing the NRA on Twitter as an “extremist organization,” and Ms. Vullo, working behind the scenes to urge companies to sever ties with the group.These victories couldn’t be more timely as America nears an election that will have implications for the Second Amendment. Liability lawsuits seeking to bankrupt the gun industry are in our courts. Efforts by Democrats to tilt the high court to the left could upend settled jurisprudence on the right not only to keep but also to bear arms. The NRA and the ACLU deserve support in defending the palladium of liberty in the seasons ahead.

New York’s Gift to the NRA

New York’s Gift to the NRA

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