Is Free Speech Outdated?
Is Free Speech Outdated? At a January 30 National Press Club luncheon in Washington, House and Senate minority leaders Richard Gephardt and Tom Daschle announced a major 1997 legislative priority...
...Okay, we're shocked...
...Thompson has some "ways" in mind, of course...
...So for reasons of partisan self-interest—and so that the essential principles involved don't get lost in the smoke—Republicans had better give some serious strategic consideration to precisely how they intend to kill the McCain-Feingold bill...
...And it would authorize the Federal Election Commission to make unilateral guesses about when such "suggestions" are about to occur—so that the commission might quickly muzzle the talk with a restraining order...
...The Democratic party currently faces the largest campaign-financing scandal in decades...
...Gephardt and Sen...
...And it would be doubly nice, and much more important, if Republicans announced right away, up front, this month, that they cannot accept and will not allow to pass anything remotely resembling the McCain-Feingold bill...
...So Rep...
...Perhaps the nation's editorial pages do not take these gentlemen's initiative seriously as a practical matter...
...And he also hopes to examine "our campaign-finance system" writ large, quite apart from questions of actual past illegality, and "seek out ways in which we can improve it...
...Republicans have nothing to lose, in short, from no-compromise opposition to campaign-finance reform, as that idea is generally understood...
...In order to persuade public opinion that Congress is boldly determined to pursue campaign "reform," so-called...
...Why the United States needs a constitutional amendment—or any other legislative "reform," for that matter—to prevent the Democratic party from violating laws already on the books is a question Rep...
...Democrats will use the scandal-charged atmosphere created by their own misdeeds to advance such reform...
...He has sworn he will let the chips fall where they may...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...Fair enough...
...Or perhaps our observing scribes are inclined to ignore the proposal for its too-obvious ulterior partisan purpose...
...And they will hope that in the resulting debate, their misdeeds are gradually forgotten...
...It is all too much, this raucous debate...
...Our discourse has "degenerated into a poisonous spectacle of negativity and half-truths and outright falsehoods...
...McCain-Feingold is ugly, foolish, and blatantly unconstitutional on any number of levels...
...And it has an implacable enemy in Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell, who will once again, if the need arises, kill McCain-Fein-gold—and preserve American liberty—with a filibuster threat...
...They are crimes, each of them, right now, under existing federal statutes...
...Let's shock the people," Gephardt recommends...
...It should be doubled, at least, and indexed for inflation, which would instantly cut the time candidates spend snuffling around for cash by more than half...
...It would expand the realm of campaign-related speech subject to those constraints to include "any suggestion to take action with respect to an election," even by a nonpartisan public-interest group...
...It is a low priority in most public-opinion surveys...
...And the country and its Constitution have everything to gain...
...At a January 30 National Press Club luncheon in Washington, House and Senate minority leaders Richard Gephardt and Tom Daschle announced a major 1997 legislative priority for their respective Democratic caucuses...
...This year's larger Republican Senate majority is more hostile to the bill than ever...
...Specifically, and explicitly, they propose to abridge the First Amendment and grant the federal government sweeping and strict authority to regulate American political advocacy: Who may speak, when, where, for how long, and for what purpose...
...Only worse: A new provision attempts to neutralize a June 1996 Supreme Court ruling that established a right to unlimited political advocacy by state-level political parties...
...And at this point, at least, its prospects are little better than those for the Gephardt-Daschle First Amendment gambit...
...No good will come if the Thompson hearings are transformed into an extended pep rally for speech-quashing campaign reform...
...Previous editorials in The Weekly Standard have analyzed the McCain-Feingold measure...
...Its congressional leaders argue that they are somehow not really guilty—indeed, that the Constitution made them do it, by sustaining a bipartisan electoral system that has become thoroughly infected by money...
...The White House and Democratic National Committee stand (convincingly) accused of soliciting and accepting financial contributions from foreign nationals, soliciting and accepting financial contributions from concealed sources, and soliciting and accepting financial contributions using government employees on government time in government offices...
...National politics, Gephardt mournfully noted, have never been "more alien to the lives of average Americans, more distant, and ultimately more disengaged...
...It is the same "McCain-Feingold" bill that died in a Senate cloture motion last year...
...At issue in the latest Democratic fund-raising controversies are not what President Clinton calls "loopholes" in an "outdated" regime of federal election law...
...He wants a large staff and budget and a period of several months in which to prepare, with public hearings not beginning until at least June...
...Daschle cannot answer...
...Chances are virtually nonexistent, as Gephardt and Daschle themselves admit, that Congress will act directly to disembowel the First Amendment this year...
...The nominally bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 1997 was introduced in the Senate January 21, along with companion legislation in the House...
...It's not clear that the problem has even occurred to the GOP as yet...
...And we're shocked, next, that the country's newspapers—whose own First Amendment interests are implicated, as well—haven't responded to this putrid idea by running Gephardt and Daschle out of Washington on a rail...
...Gephardt and Sen...
...The public-funding program for major-party presidential candidates should be abolished...
...He is one of only two Republican sponsors—with Arizona's John McCain himself—of the McCain-Feingold scheme...
...But with a promise of vigorous support from the president, they will push such legislation again this year...
...Suffice it to say that the bill would place severe constraints on any federal campaign activity that costs money...
...The current $1,000 limit on individual contributions to federal candidates hasn't changed a dime since 1974...
...no credible allegation of corruption—against Democrats or Republicans—will go unscrutinized...
...Bill Clinton, remember, besieged by revelations from last year's campaign, now enjoys the highest approval ratings of his presidency...
...Daschle now propose that there be less of it...
...That program's "voluntary" spending limits, after all, are what encouraged the Democratic National Committee to hunt so aggressively for "soft money" last year—to its current embarrassment...
...These are not constitutionally protected enterprises...
...Let's amend the Constitution...
...Campaign-finance reform is not so "popular" as we are usually told...
...Still, campaign-finance reform will remain a frontpage issue for many months...
...It is a lie...
...Shocked, first, that the congressional Democratic party would formally commit itself to such a frontal assault on political speech, which the Constitution has for 210 years insulated from government restraint and penalty...
...It bears repeating here that this spin is more than simply transparent...
...They will charge opposing Republicans with defending "sleaze...
...Kentucky senator Fred Thompson's Governmental Affairs Committee has been charged by the Republican leadership with investigating fund-raising corruption in the 1996 campaign...
...It would be nice if Republicans proposed campaign reforms with real merit...
Vol. 2 • February 1997 • No. 22
