PLEASE FORWARD TO FRIENDS WHO CARE ABOUT INTERNET
Dear Everyone;
The WSJ has an editorial today which speaks out against the new FEC
proposed regs for bloggers and for free blog speech.
Ron Getty
SF Libertarian
McCain-Feingold Online
Will the FEC make bloggers kiss the First Amendment goodbye?
Wednesday, March 23, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
When it comes to the law of unintended consequences, the McCain-
Feingold campaign-finance "reform" is rapidly becoming a legal
phenomenon. The latest example comes courtesy of the Federal
Election Commission, where officials are being asked to extend the
law to the very people it is supposed to empower: individual
citizens.
We'd like to say we're surprised, but this was always going to be
the end result of a law that naively believed it could ban money
from politics. Since 2003, when the Supreme Court upheld it, McCain-
Feingold has failed spectacularly in its stated goal of reining in
fat-cat donors. Yet its uncompromising language has helped to gag
practically every other politically active entity--from advocacy
groups to labor unions. Now the FEC is being asked to censor another
segment of society, the millions of individuals who engage in
political activity online.
The problem facing the FEC is that McCain-Feingold broadly restricts
coordination with, and contributions to, political candidates. So
what is the agency to do with all those people who use their Web
sites to praise a candidate? Computers and Web access cost money,
which could be construed as a financial contribution to a campaign.
Ditto bloggers who link to politicians' Web sites, or any individual
who forwards a candidate's press release to a list of buddies. All
this is to say nothing of blogs that are affiliated with political
campaigns and coordinate their activities.
To its credit, the FEC tried to avoid this headache in 2002 by
exempting the Internet from campaign-finance rules. This proved far
too sensible for the sponsors of the law, who sued the commission
for allowing "loopholes" and got a federal judge to strike down the
exemption. The FEC must now decide just how it intends to monitor
and penalize all those attempting to corrupt the U.S. political
system via modem.
An idea kicking around the FEC a few years ago would require
government to calculate the percentage of individuals' electricity
bills that went toward political advocacy (we aren't joking).
Another alternative would be to classify all bloggers as
journalists, seeing as how the press is about the only entity exempt
from McCain-Feingold. As much we enjoy our profession, we think a
nation of journalists is overkill.
One of the more exciting things about last year's elections was how
the Internet galvanized voter interest and turnout--from the Howard
Dean grassroots movement to the bloggers who kept Dan Rather on his
toes. Some 75 million Americans are estimated to have used the
Internet to get political information in 2004. Too bad the very law
that was supposed to encourage this buzz may ultimately be its
demise.
--- In lpsf-discuss@yahoogroups.com, "Dr. Michael R. Edelstein"
<dredelstein@t...> wrote: