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UC Berkeley Student Government Considers Stripping Funds From College Republicans And Giving Them To Black Student Union

   DailyWire.com

On Thursday, the student government of the University of California, Berkeley, will vote on defunding Berkeley’s chapter of the College Republicans and transferring the funds to the Black Student Union. Senator Rizza Estacio, who proposed the idea, told the student newspaper The Daily Californian that the College Republicans had violated school policy during campus events.

Estacio said, “Some of what this organization has done has broken regulations that we uphold to every registered student organization. I want to make it clear that if you break these rules, you are no longer eligible for our funding.”

As Ema Gavrilovic of The College Fix notes, the Berkeley College Republicans called Estacio’s proposal “poorly researched and unscrupulous,” adding that it was “based on a complete falsehood.” They told The College Fix that the student government “censures Senator Estacio for this poorly researched and unscrupulous proposal … The backdrop of this proposal is based on a complete falsehood.” They also pointed out that the group was “not involved in any capacity with the planning and organization of Free Speech Week … It is deeply concerning that the ASUC may strip BCR of its annual allocation due to spurious reasoning and misinformation.”

UCLA Professor Eugene Volokh told The College Fix that Supreme Court precedent requires a “content-neutral application of generally applicable and enforced rules is generally allowed; targeting a group because of its viewpoint is not.”

But according to The College fix, no explanation of exactly what the College Republicans had done to warrant the punitive action was forthcoming.

Ari Cohn, from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, told The College Fix, “De-funding the Berkeley College Republicans because their expression offended others on campus would certainly violate the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has made clear for decades that when mandatory student fees are used to fund student organizations, those funds must be distributed in a viewpoint-neutral fashion. As an agent of the university to which administrators have delegated the responsibility of distributing the mandatory fees that the university collects, ASUC is bound by the First Amendment in its performance of this role the same as the university itself would be.”

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