Democrats Against Free Speech

Look where campaign-finance "reform" has led us to.

Democrats on Wednesday managed to defeat a bill aimed at amending U.S. election laws to immunize bloggers from hundreds of pages of federal regulations.

In an acrimonious debate that broke largely along party lines, more than three-quarters of congressional Democrats voted to oppose the reform bill, which had enjoyed wide support from online activists and Web commentators worried about having to comply with a tangled skein of rules.

The vote tally in the House of Representatives, 225 to 182, was not enough to send the Online Freedom of Speech Act to the Senate. Under the rules that House leaders adopted to accelerate the process, a two-thirds supermajority was required.

[...]

Opponents of the reform plan mounted a last-minute effort to derail the bill before the vote on Wednesday evening. Liberal advocacy groups circulated letters warning the measure was too broad and would invite "corrupt" activities online, and The New York Times wrote in an editorial this week that "the Internet would become a free-fire zone without any limits on spending."

How utterly disgraceful. As if this weren't bad enough, take a look at the ridiculous analogy put forth by one of the partisan stooges who voted for this nonsense.

Rep. Marty Meehan, a Massachusetts Democrat who opposed the bill, said during the floor debate: "We don't allow child pornography on the Internet. We don't exempt it from consumer safety laws...We don't because we think those laws are important." Campaign finance regulations should be extended as well, he said.

What an idiot! To liken a prohibition on the circulation of images depicting the abuse of children to a restriction on the exercise of free speech online is the height of gall, a measure of the extent to which the brains of some have been sickened by the fear of political competition. It is no surprise that the New York Times should be against the guarantee of free speech online, either: any measure which restricts competition in the opinion-making business will be welcomed with open arms by Sulzburger and co.

Campaign finance laws are a travesty of free speech in general, but at least with TV and newsprint one could put forth the limited nature of airtime and the oligopolistic nature of most newspaper markets as a semi-defensible excuse: with a web on which anyone can turn out as much material as he or she can fit on a web server's hard drives, that is clearly not the case. This is about nothing more than gaining control over the one platform on which the First Amendment is still accorded full respect: why should I need to file a report with the FEC about the sources of my income in order to say that I think Politician XYZ is a dunderhead?

[Via Slashdot.]

Comments

[Ross]

"Rep. Marty Meehan, a Massachusetts Democrat who opposed the bill, said during the floor debate: "We don't allow child pornography on the Internet. We don't exempt it from consumer safety laws."

Parhaps Rep. Meehan should be banned from publishing campaign leaflets during the congressional elections because you wouldn't allow him to publish child pornography.

[gene berman]

I wouldn't get too excited. This move is just a shot across the bows of a much larger and powerful ship. No amount of such sniping will prove more than a temporary annoyance and I don't think we'll have to wait long to see greater sense (and sense of freedom) prevail.

[Abiola Lapite]

I don't doubt that the bill will eventually pass, I just find it astonishing that so many Democrats should be so willing to display such little respect for freedom of speech: I mean, we're talking about a bill even the folks at DKos were in favor of here, a bill which is being championed in the Senate by none other than Harry Reid,

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:s.00678:

not some impenetrable piece of partisan legislation intended to benefit a privileged special group, and yet they *still* opposed it. This is an utter disgrace.

[Jim]

"we're talking about a bill even the folks at DKos were in favor of here, .."

Are you surprised at the disconnect? Kos is ideologically motivated (we hope) and Meehan, like any politician, is politically motivated - not the same thing.