While I have long questioned the appropriateness of lumping everything but the kitchen sink into the category of speech, even as people opening their own mouths to voice an objection or opinion is increasingly restricted in all sorts of public venues, the events in Wisconsin being addressed by the Wall Street Journal, even though they are targeting all sorts of communications (spoken, printed and electronically spread), are categorically different in that the investigation is occurring after the fact.
The people at the Wall Street Journal may well argue that one person or group's communications being investigated for illegal co-ordination (perhaps even incitement to mayhem) will have the effect of stiffling or intimidating other individuals or groups from similar behavior in the future, but I have long tried to point out that the prohibitions in the First Amendments, despite the claim that "protecting" rights is the objective, actually serve to insure that our agents of government are made aware of public discontent, rather than forcing dissidents to conspire and organize in secret. Because dissatisfied people forced to go underground are a real threat to the common welfare.
Investigating, after the fact, whether or not people conspired to deprive others of their rights to speak, assemble, perambulate and congregate is entirely consistent with the general Constitutional principle that suspicions have to be proved with evidence and the evidence is to be collected AFTER behavior becomes suspect and a complaint has been filed. What's being reported about Wisconsin seems to satisfy all those criteria.
Time is of the essence, but that seems to be something people lacking a sense of time don't understand. So, it upsets them. And that upsettedness probably accounts for their penchant for pre-emptive action, which also sets them at odds with the Constitution. When the system is time-dependent, people who have no sense of time can't get a break.
On the other hand, the prohibition against non-profits coordinating political action and propaganda is merely sustained by giving them an exemption from paying certain taxes to the federal and state governmental entities. So, if they violated that condition, the proper response will be to make them pay what they would have otherwise owed and, since dollars need to return to the Treasury as often as possible anyway, that would be a good thing.
Indeed, as I have often argued, exempting special interests from paying taxes is a bad practice, being both coercive and an example of favoritism. Legislators abating some people's taxes may be legal, but awfully close to corruption. Even if one accepts the notion that paying taxes is punishment and an abatement is punishment withheld, if punishment was not merited in the first place, withholding it is wrong.
Legal crime. The U.S. has a long history of hiding immoral behavior under the rule of law.
I don't, by the way, agree with the SCOTUS equating speech with money. Speech is like money, a tangible/visible/symbolic representation of human ideas and value judgements, but speech is essentially different in that it originates from the individual, while currency, like the alphabet, is a social construct. And, being that money issues, in the case of the U.S., from the federal Treasury, its distribution and use is properly regulated by our agents of government. People who use dollars put themselves into an obligatory situation. That is, by making use of a socially certified IOU, they pledge their compliance with the associated strictures, much as persons seeking official recognition of their marital relationships pledge to honor their commitments.
We should not be surprised that the same people, who don't get what it means to undertake marital obligations and perceive marriage as some sort of privileged status that's reserved on the basis of gender and sexual preference, also don't get that the essence of our currency does not change according the personal predilections of the people who use it -- that "taxpayer" and "corporate" and "Wall Street" and "Medicare" and "foreign" are all irrelevant designations for the U.S. dollar. Even Zimbabwe using the U.S. dollar as its official currency does not change the fact that the credit of the citizens of the U.S. is what assures its value. Nor, for that matter, does the issuance of more dollars decrease their value. Why? Because dollars are worthless unless and until someone spends them.
What does that mean? It means that politicians who inveigh against "tax and spend," are not very different from the cock crowing to affect the "rising" of the sun. It is possible for people not to spend and not to tax. As far as we know, the Pirahã of Brazil manage without. But, any society that's hooked on using money to transact its affairs, needs to have a strategy for getting it back to the Treasury to be certified, if nothing else. If we think of the dollar as nothing but a useful tool, then not only will sending it back to the Treasury not seem onerous, but it will be robbed of much of its potential to coerce and destroy.