This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, September 23rd, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

In Citizens United, the Supreme Court appeared to re-establish limits over what the government can and can't do to restrict the speech rights of

owners of corporations and union members. But what about average Joes who just

want to talk about politics? Alan Dickerson is legal director at the Center for Competitive Politics and is working on just such a case but he hopes to take to the Supreme Court.

We spoke this week.

Since Citizens United and this IRS scandal there's been a lot of extra scrutiny paid to groups and

the extent to which they are involved in politics of course the rule of the

IRS was are you predominantly involved in politics is it more

than half of what you do and what does that even look like it seems like your case that

you're working on has some shades of that describe that.

I think that's true in two ways.

One is that the IRS does have this idea that you have to be not principally involved in politics but no one really

knows either what political activity means in that context nor precisely what

you know percentage threshold we're talking about and that sort of that sort of lack of

clarity is problematic everywhere but especially problematic for small grassroots

organizations which can't generally hire attorneys and accountants to wade through these very these very complicated regimes.

So our case actually comes out of a state context.

Edmond Corsi has sued the Ohio Election Commission and the case is currently before

the U.S. Supreme Court.

The issue is whether or not there are organizations so small or organizations whose activity is not predominantly political, but whether a state may nonetheless force that organization or that person to register with it, give up their donors, follow you know very

invasive regulatory regimes.

...