At issue is a California law that requires tax-exempt charities to file with the state a list of their large donors — a copy, in fact, of the list they file annually with the IRS.

Transcript

NOEL KING, HOST:

The Supreme Court will hear a case today involving rich conservatives and rich liberals, their anonymous donations to charities and the tax breaks they get. At issue is a law in California that requires tax-exempt charities to file a list of their large donors. Here's NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg.

NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: The IRS form to be attached to the state filing reports the names and addresses of all donors who give $5,000 to the charity or more than 2% of the total donations. The names and addresses are confidential and not to be publicly disclosed. In 2012, the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, backed by the conservative Koch brothers, and the Thomas More Law Center, another conservative group, refused to report those donor names. They claimed that to do so would violate their First Amendment right to freedom of association and that it would subject their donors to potential harassment. The Koch brothers' foundation rests its argument on a 1958 Supreme Court decision that struck down an Alabama law which required that the NAACP publicly disclose the names of all of its members. Lawyer Kathleen Sullivan represents the AFP Foundation.

KATHLEEN SULLIVAN: If people couldn't give anonymously to the NAACP in 1958, it might not have been able to make the advances for civil rights it did. Especially now, the stakes are very high because the Internet and the political polarization in our society make it very, very hard to give to an unpopular cause and endure the retaliation and reprisal and threats of violence that may follow.

SEAN DELANEY: The notion that this has any resemblance whatsoever to cases like NAACP v. Alabama is, frankly, an insult to the civil rights movement.

TOTENBERG: That's Sean Delaney, the former head of the New York State bureau charged with supervising charities. He points out that here, unlike in Alabama, there are criminal penalties for public disclosure of donor names, and only big donors must be reported at all. In the case of the Koch brothers' foundation, for instance, the 2% rule meant that in 2018, only donors who gave more than $340,000 had to be reported. Historically, it's the state attorneys general who police charities. And in California, a state with 115,000 charities, that's a big job.

JAN MASAOKA: I compare it to the Federal Aviation Administration.

TOTENBERG: Jan Masaoka, the CEO of the California Association of Nonprofits, says that just as the FAA needs confidential information from airplane manufacturers and airlines to ensure safety in air travel, California and other states need information from charities to ferret out fraud and self-dealing. As she puts it...

MASAOKA: All of us, nonprofits and donors, you know, we want to have that confidence that the rules are being enforced. And we need the attorney general to be able to do that.

TOTENBERG: Former New York charity regulator Delaney says the only way to do that with so many charities to monitor is to have scannable information programmed into a computer that looks for red flags.

DELANEY: That's a common way in which this data is used by states in order to be able to then identify potentially problematic organizations.

TOTENBERG: Donor information, for instance, was central to identifying that there were certain tax-exempt credit counseling agencies ostensibly set up to help consumers that were instead benefiting the charity's major donors. Similarly, the Federal Trade Commission used donor information to figure out that the Cancer Fund of America engaged in a long-running scheme to deceptively solicit more than $187 million from donors, money that was funneled into four organizations, all managed by members of the same family who were able to create high-paying jobs and fancy perks for themselves, their families and friends, including cars, trips, luxury cruises, college tuition and much more. But Americans for Prosperity lawyer Sullivan says there are alternatives to what she calls California's sweeping demand for donor information.

SULLIVAN: They can use targeted audit letters or subpoenas if they ever need that information for a legitimate investigation. And where the government doesn't need to know the names of your donors, it shouldn't be allowed to, under the First Amendment.

TOTENBERG: Scott Nelson of the nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen says that's nonsense.

SCOTT NELSON: The idea that an investigator can start a full-blown investigation and issue a bunch of subpoenas just sort of completely blinks the reality of how bureaucracies work. They have to get some kind of a red flag before they know which charities to pick out for that kind of investigation.

TOTENBERG: The AFP Foundation's Sullivan points to inadvertant public disclosures of some donor names in California. She maintains they were substantial and repeated. Nelson counters that the problems with the state's data system were short-lived and have been fixed. And Sullivan concedes that the disclosures cannot be directly linked to the harassment and threats that donors say they've experienced.

Indeed, many donors, like the Koch brothers themselves, are well known as are their views. In the Supreme Court, an astounding 63 briefs have been filed in support of the Koch brothers' foundation. And while the overwhelming majority were filed by conservative advocacy groups, a small but significant set were filed by liberal groups, like the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. So today's case is seen as a very big deal and something of a stalking horse for a future fight over a political donor disclosures. Former New York state regulator Delaney.

DELANEY: This fight is a skirmish in a larger war.

TOTENBERG: In the political context, the Supreme Court has long ruled that disclosure of campaign donor names is constitutional because it serves the important public interest of accountability by disclosing who has skin in the game of influencing government policy. Indeed, public disclosure is perhaps the only major remaining check on political contributions. And some political donors would like to see it eliminated. At the same time, charity regulators would like to see regulations toughened up to prevent tax-exempt nonprofits from being used for partisan purposes. Bottom line, says Public Citizen's Scott Nelson...

NELSON: If the challengers get what they want here, it's going to make the job of being a watchdog a lot harder.

TOTENBERG: A decision in the case is expected by summer. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.

(SOUNDBITE OF TINGVALL TRIO'S "CIRKLAR") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.