The Supreme Court returns on Friday for the justices’ first conference of the new year. Two of the cases they’ll consider taking up are strange challenges to a California law aimed at preventing fraud among charitable organizations. Two conservative political-advocacy groups, supported by a host of other nonprofits, are trying to keep the identities of their top donors out of a registry maintained by the state attorney general’s office.

The groups and their allies argue that the forced disclosures violate their constitutional rights to freedom of association. They claim that the requirement could have a chilling effect on donations and even place supporters at risk of harassment and physical peril—though the state offered assurances that this information would not be released to the general public. If the justices agree to hear the cases, it will set a new benchmark on the Roberts court’s willingness to interpret the First Amendment as a shield for the wealthiest and most influential Americans. It will also test whether the pervasive sense of distrust among the country’s political factions has reached the high court at last.

The cases, Thomas More Law Center v. Becerra and Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Becerra, take aim at a California law that requires charities operating in the state to provide certain records to the state government every year for regulatory purposes. To ensure that tax-exempt groups aren’t committing fraud, the IRS generally requires those groups to submit a form that identifies donors whose contributions are either greater than $5,000 or make up more than 2 percent of the group’s budget. Federal law bars the IRS from releasing the contents of those forms, which are known as Section B forms, to the public in any manner.

California also requires charities to submit the same IRS form to the state attorney general’s office for regulatory purposes, although enforcement of this rule was apparently lax until the last decade. In 2012, the office sent a notice to the Thomas More Law Center that it needed to provide its Schedule B forms. The office sent a similar notice to the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in 2013. Both organizations eventually filed lawsuits to block the state from collecting their forms. A federal district court blocked the office from obtaining both of their forms, but the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the decision and ruled in California’s favor in 2018.

Both organizations focus on different aspects of right-wing politics. AFP is one of the main organizations in the network of libertarian and conservative groups founded by Charles and David Koch. It opposes right-to-work laws, environmental regulations, and what it perceives as government meddling in the free market. The TMLC, a legal organization, said its mission was to “restore and defend America’s Judeo-Christian heritage” by promoting Roman Catholic values on family and marriage and opposing the “imposition of sharia law within the United States.”