SCOTUS Agrees to Take Up a Landmark New York NRA Case

A New York government official, working for now-disgraced ex-governor Andrew Cuomo, cut off the NRA’s access to banks and insurance companies because she didn’t like their politics. Additionally, regulated companies were punished for doing business with the government’s political foes. Do these actions violate the First Amendment? These are the questions the Supreme Court has agreed to take up.

It is so critical that 18 states urged the Court to consider it, citing “troubling allegations of governmental abuse of power.”

The case involves the NRA and Maria Vullo, formerly the New York State Superintendent of Financial Services, who regulated banks and insurance companies. Her boss, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo, tweeted: “If I could have put the @NRA out of business, I would have done it 20 years ago. I’ll see you in court.”

The tyrannical Gov. Cuomo put the NRA “out of business” for their viewpoints. He tried various approaches but decided bullying corporations was the way to go.

Superintendent Maria Vullo did what Andrew Cuomo directed. She issued “Guidance Letters” to banks and insurers doing business in New York and secretly met some she knew were doing business with the NRA to “urge” them to stop. She slapped millions of dollars in fines on some who didn’t stop. She only focused on the NRA, not other organizations doing the same sort of thing.

The NRA’s insurers, for example, stopped insuring the organization’s members for fear of Vullo’s punishments.

NRA attorneys Andrew Grossman and David Rivkin wrote on Rivkin’s website: It’s the classic threat of B-movie mobsters: Nice business you got there, it’d be a shame if something happened to it. Government shouldn’t operate like that, but it too often does, sometimes to evade the Constitution’s limits on its power. A recent decision by the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the practice and provided a road map for officials to circumvent the First Amendment’s protection for freedom of speech.

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