As America prepares to celebrate her 250th birthday, this year’s Bill of Rights Day (December 15) takes on special importance. The Bill of Rights is not just an important historical document, but the lifeblood of American democracy and civil society.

The Bill of Rights was created out of a recognition that, unless rights are explicitly protected, they will forever be vulnerable to encroachments by a power-hungry federal government. Few constitutional rights better exemplify this danger than the cause that animates People United for Privacy Foundation: donor privacy.

The freedom to join and support causes without the government looking over your shoulder was of critical importance to the Founding Fathers. Associations like the Sons of Liberty were crucial to organizing resistance to British taxes in the lead-up to the American Revolution. Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense, was anonymously authored and published, as were the Federalist Papers arguing for the ratification of the Constitution.

The Founders enshrined the right to donor privacy in the First Amendment’s protections for freedom of speech, press, assembly, and petition. Through these liberties, Americans may form associations to advocate for their shared interests and beliefs. America soon became a land of “joiners,” such that Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed: “In no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used, or more unsparingly applied to a multitude of different objects, than in America.”

Despite the American people’s obsession with joining, government officials have never stopped trying to disrupt or deter associations from forming. In the 1950s and 1960s, segregationist leaders sought to snuff out the Civil Rights Movement by targeting organizations like the NAACP with lawfare and demands to disclose their donor and member lists. Similarly, anti-communist crusaders like Joseph McCarthy sought to force Americans with alleged communist sympathies to name names of their fellow travelers.

More recently, the Obama administration turned the power of the federal government on conservative and anti-tax groups, leading to the infamous IRS Tea Party targeting scandal. Today, officials from both parties routinely put donor privacy at risk in hopes of “exposing” networks of support for policies or candidates they oppose. Just a few weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case where New Jersey’s pro-abortion rights Attorney General is seeking to force an anti-abortion pregnancy center to turn over its donor list.

All of these controversies have one thing in common: government officials attempting to pry into the private affairs of groups of Americans in hopes of stifling their First Amendment rights to speak out and call for change.

One strategy for stopping these assaults on donor privacy is to do what our Founders did: put explicit protections for our rights into the law. That’s why PUFPF has successfully encouraged 22 states to pass the Personal Privacy Protection Act, which prohibits state agencies from making unlawful demands or disclosures relating to the personal information of a nonprofit’s members, donors, or volunteers. It’s also a key motivation behind our new Protect Donors at Home Act, which directs states to redact campaign donors’ home addresses from public databases.

Strong legal precedents for donor privacy, like NAACP v. Alabama and Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, are indispensable tools for defending privacy in the courts. Yet history has proven, again and again, that government officials will eventually find new ways to pursue donor lists. Proactive legislation to protect donor privacy offers a crucial additional safeguard.

The Founders did an amazing job of drafting a Constitution to stand the test of time. Even so, when they looked at their work, they decided a little extra protection for our liberty was needed. So, the Bill of Rights was born.

Today, an America without the Bill of Rights is unthinkable. Hopefully, one day, an America without proactive protections for donor privacy will be unthinkable too.