The Left's Campaign Against Free Speech

Very bothersome stuff. I find it hard to believe our First Amendments rights could really go away, but then again, I was absolutely sure that McCain-Feingold would be struck down as blatantly unconstitutional. And it was upheld. So now I'm not so sure.

Instead of fighting back with ideas, however, today's liberals quietly, relentlessly and illiberally are working to smother this flourishing universe of political discourse under a tangle of campaign-finance and media regulations. Their campaign represents the most sustained attack on free political speech in the United States since the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts.

I found this shocking:

Campaign-finance reform has a squeaky-clean image, but the dirty truth is that this speech-throttling legislation is partly the result of a hoax perpetrated by a handful of liberal foundations, led by the venerable Pew Charitable Trusts. New York Post reporter Ryan Sager exposed the scam when he got hold of a 2004 videotape of former Pew official Sean Treglia telling a roomful of journalists and professors how Pew and other foundations spent years bankrolling various experts, ostensibly independent nonprofits (including the Center for Public Integrity and Democracy 21), and media outlets (NPR got $1.2 million for "news coverage of financial influence in political decision-making")--all aimed at fooling Washington into thinking that Americans were clamoring for reform, when in truth there was little public pressure to "clean up the system." "The target group for all this activity was 535 people in Washington," said Mr. Treglia matter-of-factly, referring to Congress. "The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot--that everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform."

One ray of hope:

This week, in Wisconsin Right to Life v. FEC, the Supreme Court declined for now to rule definitively on a new challenge to McCain-Feingold. This may be excellent news, since it means the court is likely to decide a future appeal once Sam Alito has replaced Sandra Day O'Connor, who in McConnell cast the deciding vote in favor of McCain-Feingold. If neither Congress nor the Supreme Court does away with this unconstitutional, un-American travesty, we can expect election regulations, in the grim words of Justice Antonin Scalia's McConnell dissent, "to grow more voluminous, more detailed, and more complex in the years to come--and always, always, with the objective of reducing the excessive amount of speech." Thus will our most effective real protection against "the actuality and appearance of corruption"--the First Amendment itself--be nullified.