“If [Sen.] Sheldon Whitehouse had his way, Lois Lerner would just look like a test run,” government watchdog Tom Jones says.

The Senate’s recent vote on the DISCLOSE Act featured some of the worst reporting ever on the bill’s threat to First Amendment rights.

New York state, in an amicus brief joined by other Democratic states in the California case, claimed it “maintains a rigorous multistep procedure to prevent public disclosure” and its “confidentiality protections have proven successful.” The documented leak betrays this claim. If the details of Ms. Haley’s nonprofit donors aren’t safe, then no charity’s contributors are.

In a pre-Labor Day news dump, the IRS admitted to publishing 120,000 taxpayer forms in a public database. Names, contact information and financial information were all available for search and download on the IRS website. The Wall Street Journal reported it was able to find at least some of the information before government staff pulled it down. Bloomberg reports that the IRS knew the information was there since August 26, but there was no indication how long the information was available to the public.

“The [Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions] committee is considering a bill that calls for a U.S. Constitutional amendment banning corporations from making independent campaign expenditures. The bill calls for improved transparency in corporate political donations. It would require an individual be tied to every corporate donation made. Legislators attempted to balance between the required transparency mandated under the bill and Constitutional rights while discussing this effort.”

At one point Ms. Lerner labeled the tea party cases “very dangerous.” She speculated that if a case reached the Supreme Court it could result in the 2010 Citizens United ruling, which extended political speech protections to groups that filed as political committees with the Federal Election Commission, being extended to tax-exempt organizations too. … In one email to someone whose name is redacted from the deposition transcript Ms. Lerner, a former FEC employee, called Citizens United “by far the worst thing that has ever happened to this country.” She also said “We are witnessing the end of America” because of the influence of money.

“The DISCLOSE Act is the first ever legislation to require disclosure for grassroots lobbying efforts … a similar attempt to do this was tried in the 1970s and it generated a huge amount of opposition across the political spectrum. If people understood that today … a lot of groups would emerge and say ‘Look, we are in favor of disclosure for actual campaigning, for or against a candidate and [what] we are not in favor of here is [disclosure for nonprofit groups] advocating on important public issues.’ Whether on the left of the right, there are going to be causes that are minority viewpoints where people are simply not going to be willing to write a check or make a donation to support an unpopular cause… If this bill becomes law, over time … it will make it difficult for minority viewpoints to appeal to our fellow Americans….”

The Supreme Court this morning struck down the California Attorney General’s demand that nonprofit advocacy groups turn over confidential information about their donors as the price of exercising the First Amendment freedom of speech.