Supreme Court clears way for NRA free speech lawsuit against ex-Cuomo official
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled Thursday that the National Rifle Association can forge ahead with a lawsuit against an ex-New York state official who warned insurers and banks they would suffer “reputational risks” by dealing with the gun rights group and urged them to cut ties.
The NRA had sued Maria Vullo, the former superintendent of the New York 🅘State Department of Financial Services (DFS), charging that her admonition from 2018 violated the First Amendment prohibition on government coercion of speech.
Thursday’s ruling reversed a 2022 finding by the New York-based Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that Vullo — who had been tapped for the DFS post by disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo — had engaged in permissible government speech.
The justices disagreed, with liberal Sonia Sotomayor writing that Vullo could not “use the power of the state to punish or suppress disfavored expression.”
“The NRA’s allegations, if true, highlight the constitutional concerns with the kind of intermediary strategy that Vullo purportedly adopted to target the NRA’s advocacy,” Sotomayor wrote. “Such a strategy allows government officials to ‘expand their regulatory jurisdiction to suppress the speech of organizations that they have no direct control over.'”
Two months after the Feb. 14, 2018, mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., Vullo issued so-called “guidance letters” to insurance companies and other financial institutions that referenced the massacre and noted “social backlash” against the NRA and other groups “that promote guns that lead to senseless violence.”
Vullo’s letters also lauded businesses that had cut ties with the NRA following the Parkland shooting for “fulfilling their corporate social responsibility.”
In a separate press release issued by Cuomo and Vullo the same day as the guidance letters, the latter called on “all insurance companies and banks doing business in New York to join the companies that have already discontinued their arrangements with the NRA, and to take prompt actions to manage these risks and promote public health and safety.”
The NRA also claimed that Vullo had “made it clear” during a meeting with insurer Lloyd’s on Feb. 27, 2018, that her office would not pursue investigations of “technical regulatory infractions” if it backed her office’s anti-NRA crusade.
“As alleged, Vullo’s communications with Lloyd’s can be reasonably understood as a threat or as an inducement,” wrote Sotomayor, who noted the NRA’s allegations had not been proven. “Either of those can be coercive. As Vullo concedes, the ‘threat need not be explicit.'”
Vullo, now an adjunct law professor at Fordham University, had argued she properly investigated NRA-endorsed insurance policies sometimes referred to as “murder insurance.”
She acknowledged she did speak out about the risks o♚f doing business with gun groups b꧂ut didn’t exert any improper pressure on companies, many of which were distancing themselves from the NRA on their own at the time.
The former DFS chief’s attorney also claimed that allowing the NRA’s suit to proceed would improperly muzzle government officials.
The NRA wa🐻s represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Bi๊den administration argued some of its claims should go forward.
The Supreme Court is also poised to opine next month on a much more high-profile free speech case in Murthy Surgeon Gen. v. Missouri over whether the Biden administration unlawfuඣlly colluded with Big Tech to stifle speech online.