Fighting Government Witch Hunts To Defend Your Constitutional Rights – NRA v. Vullo

As incredible as it sounds, the National Rifle Association (NRA), one of the most visible and active Second Amendment advocacy groups in America, has been blacklisted in the state of New York by that state’s powerful Department of Financial Services (DFS) over the NRA’s stance on guns. Because the ACLJ exists to challenge government power when it suppresses the First Amendment rights of citizens or of lawful citizen organizations, we have joined this legal fight.

We have just filed with the U.S. Supreme Court our amicus (“friend of the court”) brief in support of the NRA’s free speech right to argue for the constitutional right to bear arms without being penalized with draconian edicts from New York officials bent on strangling the NRA’s business dealings. In other words, we’re defending the First Amendment right to defend the Second Amendment.

The former head of New York’s DFS, with the support of then-Governor Cuomo, in an official communication to insurance companies, banks, and financial institutions throughout the state, strongly “encouraged” them to boycott the NRA or to discontinue gun rights insurance programs with that Second Amendment group.

The governor even lauded this approach, boasting that the government was “forcing the NRA into financial jeopardy.”

Of course, under the First Amendment, no arm of the government can deliberately and directly destroy advocacy groups because of the positions they take on legal, social, religious, or political issues. That much is crystal clear.

But what is also clear to us here at the ACLJ in this case of NRA v. Vullo is that a government agency like DFS cannot constitutionally manipulate private insurance companies and financial institutions to do the state’s bidding in retaliating against the NRA or any other lawful group.

But we have a solid basis to believe that is exactly what has happened. DFS has vast power to cripple those companies if they don’t comply with requests because DFS has regulatory authority over them, including referring them for criminal prosecution or investigating those companies over even minor “technical” issues. In fact, the insurance companies that had been dealing with the NRA were subjected to those exact kinds of expensive investigations over minor issues. DFS’s wrongful exercise of regulatory pressure resulted in the NRA losing an important ability to benefit from insurance and financial transactions in the state of New York, one of America’s major commercial hubs.

Now faced with the ACLJ’s arguments and those of the NRA and others, the Supreme Court will decide whether government agencies like DFS will be allowed to continue retaliating against disfavored groups by pressuring private companies that they regulate to act as their unofficial government deputies of censorship and suppression. Increasingly, we are witnessing this kind of government ploy to undermine the First Amendment, including yet another Supreme Court case we are engaging in very soon.

Stay tuned, and thank you for supporting our battle against these insidious threats to your liberties.