Posted by: Dale Franks on Monday, June 13, 2005 Nick Schulz, the editor of TechCentralStation, interviews FEC Commissioner Brad Smith, and the news for the Internet in general, and blogging in particular, doesn't look good. A couple of things of note follow. Well, to say nobody wants to "shutdown" blogs, that's a pretty extreme standard if that's the standard we are using for whether people should be concerned or not. And one of the problems I think with campaign finance law and regulation is that it adds complexity and makes it more difficult for citizens to participate in politics—it puts legal hurdles in their way.Regulation is never a one-time deal. It always grows. Look at any incidence of Federal Regulation, and the common thread is that regulation grows ever more burdensome. Now, Nick Schulz is a nice guy. And, admittedly, working as he does for a corporate-sponsored politics site, the idea of the FEC scrutinize him as an example of big money in politics is probably pretty scary. But the FEC might cast a very wide net that covers a lot more than TCS. A lot more. SMITH: What's interesting is that a group blog, if it doesn't have the press exemption, seems to more clearly fall into the statutory definition of "political committee," which is a group of people who are engaged is making expenditures and contributions to political campaigns. And so if you have a group of people blogging, I think it raises even further the possibilities that they could be deemed to be a political committee and then everything they do would be subject to some level of regulation.QandO is, of course, a group blog. We criticize politicians directly. And we have a particular political point of view? So, does that make the three of us a "political comittee"? Would we be banned from saying anything about a candidate, because our time is a "political contribution" to a campaign, even if there's not any coordination between us and any campaign? It was a great country we had here once. But every day, in so many ways, we're losing every one of the liberties the founders bequeathed to us. We are in the process of building the same system the Europeans have: A system where the limits to acceptable political debate are severely circumscribed, and political elites make every possible decision they can, while granting us an increasingly meaningless fiction of democracy. And this is happening, by the way, uncer a Republican administration. McCain-Feingold was sponsored primarily by a Republican senator, passed into law by a Republican President, and upheld by a Supreme Court whose justices were primarily appointed by Republicans. So much for Republicans being the party of "Smaller government". So much for Ronald Reagan's "Government isn't the solution to the problem; Government is the problem". No, now it's "When people is hurting, government must act." That's the regime under George Bush's "compassionate conservatism". What really irks me is that the idea of "Campaign Finance Reform" is so popular on the Left. I mean, what's preferable, that Big Business gets to use their money to promote speech favorable to them, or to have your freedom of speech limited so that those Big Corporate bastards have to keep their mouth shut, too? In what way is limiting everyone's freedom of speech a good trade-off? Well, I hope you enjoyed freedom of speech. Because it's almost gone now. Gone. |
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