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VICTORY FOR FREE SPEECH July 15, 2001 - Washington, D.C. - If the McCain-Feingold (S.27 in the Senate), Shays-Meehan (H.R.2356 in the House) campaign finance reform bills are such wonderful pieces of legislation -- as the national news media never tires of telling us; and if these bills pose no threat to our First Amendment freedom of speech -- as the national news media never tires of telling us; then why is the media exempt from the very laws that they demanded Congress impose on the rest of us? Section 201of both pieces of legislation is titled "Disclosure of Electioneering Communications", and requires that "Every person who makes a disbursement for electioneering communications in an aggregate amount in excess of $10,000 during any calendar year shall…file with the [Federal Election] Commission a statement containing" the following information, "under penalty of perjury": "The identification of the person making the disbursement; The principal place of business of the person making the disbursement; The amount of each disbursement of more than $200…and the identification of the person to whom the disbursement was made; and the names and addresses of all contributors who contributed an aggregate amount of $1,000 or more to that account…". HOWEVER: "The term 'electioneering communication' does not include -- a communication appearing in a news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through the facilities of any broadcasting station…". For most of the media, enactment of Shays-Meehan in the House has become an obsession. Literally every day during the week of House debate, the major media ran multiple articles and editorials hysterically demanding passage, including an editorial plea in the Washington Post authored by McCain and Meehan themselves, on the very day that debate began. Congressman Robert Ney is the author of the principle alternative campaign reform bill. Where was his opportunity to make an editorial plea for the passage of his bill on the pages of the Washington Post? Congressman Ney had no such opportunity. The Post didn't like what Ney proposed, calling it "phony", a "straw", and a "shell"; but the Post loves the McCain and Meehan bills. So McCain and Meehan got their voices heard, for free, in the Post. Ney did not. So where's the level playing field that the "reformers" prattle on about? Where's the elimination of special interests that the "reformers" claim to want? Yes, there was an editorial on the same day by Congressman Albert Wynn (a democrat) in opposition to Shays-Meehan, but his primary complaint was that the elimination of soft money would hurt "get out the vote" drives, and he wanted more money, not less, to "mobilize minority voters". And he advocated "public finance" of campaigns, a position even more offensive to free speech than any of the bills now under debate. Where was the voice advocating the right of Americans to participate in political debates and support their political parties? Where was the voice talking about the First Amendment? Those voices didn't have anything to say that the media deemed worthy of reporting, so they weren't given free editorial space like John McCain and Marty Meehan. Which proves as nothing else could, how some politicians pushing some agendas will always be able to put their message before the public, regardless of any campaign reform or bans on money, while other people with other ideas will be shut out by the media gatekeepers. And that would only get worse under McCain and Shays. Under the current rules at least the GOP could have bought advertising space so that Ney's ideas could be presented, for a price, along with what McCain and Meehan got for free this week (assuming that the media agreed to sell them the space). But under the McCain-Shays so-called reform bills, that avenue would have been banned entirely. Only those people with a message approved by the major media would get their voices heard. You who have other ideas that the media disapproves of; you who aren't media darlings like John McCain; you ordinary citizens who just want to contribute your few dollars to a group you believe in, to be pooled with other small voices so that you will at least get heard -- you can just shut up. But that's what a lot of us appear to want anyway. A 1999 poll by the First Amendment Center found that nearly one third of us believe that the First Amendment goes too far in the rights that it guarantees. It's amazing how eager so many of us seem to be to throw away our -- and everyone else's -- Constitutional rights. But, the "reformer" argument goes, those reforms don't block anyone's freedom of speech. You still have the right to put a yard sign on your front lawn. Well that will certainly balance out daily editorials in the Washington Post and the New York Times that are read by millions, won't it? And you still can write letters to the editor. Try getting an opinion letter that disagrees with the ideological stance of a major newspaper published in that paper. Go ahead and read the letters to the editor of the Washington Post or the New York Times or any other major newspaper for the past two weeks. How many letters have they published opposing the official stand of those newspapers? And even if there are one or two, here or there, how does that in any way level the field with daily front page stories masquerading as "news" and multiple editorials on a daily basis, touting only one point of view? And even that small avenue of disputing the media's conventional wisdom is not available with TV (where half of all Americans get their news). Nobody disputes the right, under the First Amendment, of the major national media to play the part of irremediable water carriers for the leftist agenda. But nobody can then pretend, with any degree of honesty, that those media outlets are neutral or unbiased, and that eliminating money from politics and thereby leaving the media as the predominant voice would in any way "put the people back in charge of their government", as McCain and Meehan claimed in their Post editorial. Eliminating soft money would put the media even more firmly in charge, which is why they love the idea so much. The media's very obsession with this issue makes it perfectly clear how dangerous these so-called "reforms" are. Campaign finance reform in the style of McCain-Feingold, Shays-Meehan has always been irrelevant to the general public. People just don't care. A Gallup Poll taken in January found that out of 14 issues ranked in importance, "improving the way political campaigns are financed" came in dead last. If this issue was of such great public concern, as McCain claims, then he would have won substantially more votes when he ran for president last year. Of late, however, campaign finance reform has become a critical issue solely because of the focus devoted to it by the second biggest, second most powerful special interest there is in this country -- the media (government itself being the first). By April, three quarters of those polled by Gallup wanted limits on the contributions that corporations and unions could make, and nearly that many (72%) favored abolishing "soft money" entirely. How many of those 72% do you suppose could even define the term "soft money"? But thanks to relentless media hounding over the past six months, even though most people probably don't know what "soft money" is, they have become convinced that they don't like it. And they want to ban it. So what is "soft money"? It is money that is contributed directly to political parties, without limit, for those parties to spend on various activities that are called "party building". Such as buying newspaper space to counter the free space given by left-wing newspapers to left-wing politicians. And such as conducting "get out the vote" drives. That's what supporters of McCain-Feingold, Shays-Meehan claim they want to eliminate. But only for some people. In fact, democrat supporters of McCain-Feingold, Shays-Meehan even tried to create their own soft money loophole to favor some of their own most loyal constituents. According to the New York Times, "Mr. Gephardt promised to meet with the members [of the Congressional Black Caucus] on Thursday morning, hours before the crucial votes to discuss their request for a commitment of as much as 10 or 15 percent of all funds raised by all national Democratic Party organizations…be committed to registration and get-out-the-vote efforts in minority areas." So if banning the flow of soft money to political parties is such a great idea, as media editorialists and many politicians claim, then why did the "reformers" try to violate their own legislation, by creating this special loophole before the bill even came up for a vote? There are plenty of other special interests, such as conservative groups, that would also like to get soft money from national political parties to "get out the vote" of their own constituents. As was pointed out in a previous issue of this newsletter, there are about 80 million gun owners in this country, President Bush got about 50 million votes total, and all the third party candidates less than 5 million votes combined. So even if every one of Bush's and the others votes came from a gun owner, that leaves at least 25 million (probably more like 40 or 50 million) gun owners who didn't bother to vote at all. Certainly the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, and other Second Amendment rights groups would like to get money from political parties to help "get out the vote" of gun owners. Why should a special loophole be created solely for the Congressional Black and Hispanic Caucus special interests? On Thursday, procedural maneuvering killed Shays-Meehan in the House, at least for the present. Democrats sought to add amendments to the bill to induce votes from their wavering supporters, and got mad when the republican leadership followed standard House procedure of holding votes on individual amendments one at a time. Of course it has always been the democrats who used blizzards of amendments, demanding individual votes on each, to obstruct republican legislation. That started as soon as the House came back into session in 1995 after democrats lost control of the House for the first time in 40 years, with the 160 amendments filed by democrats to block unfunded mandate reform. And it has been their tactic ever since. Now, suddenly, they are upset when their own tactics ended up killing their own bill. Friday's headlines made it clear how upset the major newspapers were that the GOP majority dared to follow traditional House rules: "A Discredit to the House" (Washington Post); "Mr. Hastert's Debacle" (New York Times); "Campaign Reform Ambush" (Boston Globe); "GOP Finds Way to Split Finance Bill Coalition" (Los Angeles Times). The ever helpful John McCain proclaimed "This is the last refuge of scoundrels." As a side note, many free market conservatives have long said that left-wing extremists, who now call themselves liberals, are socialists at heart. This is vehemently denied by those leftists and their media mouthpieces. Until, that is, the furor of the campaign finance debate apparently caused the left's main mouthpiece, the Washington Post, to slip. In an editorial on the day debate began on Shays-Meehan, the Post actually wrote, "The federal government plays many roles in the society. One of the most basic is the modest redistribution of resources, most of the time from haves toward have-nots. That mildly redistributive role, carried out through the budget and regulatory policy, is one of the principal albeit largely unspoken issues in every national election. Should the role be expanded a bit, or narrowed?" This country was founded on an entirely different idea. The redistribution of wealth, which is the core of socialism, was a hateful idea to the Founders: "To take from one, because it is thought his own industry has acquired too much, in order to spare to others who have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it." -- Thomas Jefferson. "A rage...for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it...". -- James Madison. And as has been painfully proven over and over again in this century, the redistribution of wealth is what inevitable leads socialist societies into totalitarian coercion. That's what the Post hoped would be enhanced by the passage of campaign finance reform. Reprinted with permission of Kim
Weissman
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