CaliforniaKid wrote:richardMdBorn wrote:McCain-Feingold shows that he doesn't believe in the First Amendment.
Rather, it shows that he interprets it differently than you do. Believe it or not, Campaign finance reform is designed to protect political speech in this country by preventing it from becoming the domain exclusively of monied interests.
I feel like being John McEnroe here. You can't be serious.
The problems with McCain Feingold are lengthy. Of course, when you call something a reform, politicians are afraid to oppose it even if it's a bad law and is probably unconstitutional. The Supreme Court with its history of bad decisions, Dred Scott etc., cannot be depended on to overrule unconstitutional laws. Here's one example about MF
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 naïvely 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.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006458
MF increases the power of the media, so of course they love it, and the power of incumbents since they already have the advantage. Restrictions hurt challengers more than incumbents since the incumbent has been running for reelection since the day they were elected.
More later