www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1046839/posts?page=1,50
And if the First Amendment is dead, can we honestly claim to be a democratic republic any more? Imagine youre at a meeting of civically minded folks and its nearly Election Day. Your Congressman is just about to vote on an issue of great concern to your group. You suggest that its time to pass around a hat, collect some money, and buy an add alerting your neighbors urging them to call the Congressman. You collect the money, and the next morning you go to buy your ad. You think youre being a good American getting involved in the democratic process. After all, the First Amendment said you have the freedom to associate which you did, with other civically-minded people. That same amendment also said you have a right to petition for redress of grievances, and that you have free speech and press rights so you can make a commercial that might reflect poorly on your Congressman. You need to become familiar with a complex web of laws, or you need to hire the consultants, lawyers, and accountants who already are familiar with those decrees before you GO to your local station, even before you collect the proverbial $200. Theyll grudgingly put up with it from their opponents because challengers usually cant raise sufficient money to publicly and effectively broadcast similar criticism, and they havent yet found a Supreme Court-sanctioned method for suppressing their opponents. But if you and your neighbors discuss an incumbents record in a paid commercial, those are now called sham issue ads. According to the majority of the Supreme Court, you need government approval to criticize a politician. However, Justices Thomas, Scalia, and Kennedy were a bit old-fashioned. They said this new law, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act BCRA, better known as McCain-Feingold, violated free speech and free press rights.
Indeed, I believe that longstanding and heretofore unchallenged opinions such as Miami Herald v. Tornillo, are in peril Now, supporters need only argue that the press capacity to manipulate popular opinion, gives rise to an appearance of corruption After drumming up some evidence, laws regulating media outlets in their issuance of editorials would be upheld under the Majoritys reasoning. Although todays opinion does not expressly strip the press of First Amendment protection, there is no principle of law or logic that would prevent the application of the Courts reasoning in that setting. Days before McCain-Feingold was to be debated in the US Senate, columnist George Will called an old colleague, Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation. He got right to the point, I hope you and yours are doing everything you can to defeat McCain-Feingold in the House. To which Will replied, I assumed that was the case, but I wanted to be sure. It may not be the Apocalypse, but the enactment of McCain-Feingold signals the death of an already bruised and battered 1st Amendment. And the destruction of the First Amendment means an apocalypse for democracy.
We have a permanent government that just took another step toward formalizing their semi-heriditary rule. All here who strove with might and main to elect Republicans are directly to blame for this outrage on the Constitution. You cant, my friends, vote for a party that routinely stabs you, their base supporters, in the back time after time after time and then profess surprise at the outcome. A bedrock principle of our Common Law is that a man is presumed to intend the foreseeable consequences of his actions. You who gave money to the Republicans and voted for the Republicans and encouraged others to do the same in justice and in law intended exactly this murder of the First Amendment. You want the tyranny that is coming, because you fear the freedom and responsibilities of the American Revolution. If that werent so, then why did your party just saddle future generations with the biggest socialist welfare-state program since LBJ? Your words are one thing, but your actions are quite the opposite thing. Your actions betray your true motives of fear of having to deal with the freedom the Constitution exacts from us. And you who supported the GOP certainly knew how rotten the tree is. Nobody can accept the leadership of a Party that gave us the egregiously mis-named Patriot Act or that of self-admitted traitors and Trotskyites like David Horowitz and the rest of the neo-con infestation and then claim ownership of the American Tradition as laid down by the Founders. You Republicans want whats coming, but you lack the moral fibre to admit it. You want to be lead, and cared for, and loved by the dark face behind the mustache on the propaganda posters that will line the streets of our childrens America. Its the lying, cryptic nature of Republican socialism and socialist Republicans that I cant stand.
JUSTICE SCALIA, concurring with respect to BCRA Titles III and IV, dissenting with respect to BCRA Titles I and V, and concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part with respect to BCRA Title II. With respect to Titles I, II, and V: I join in full the dissent of THE CHIEF JUSTICE; I join the opinion of JUSTICE KENNEDY, except to the extent it upholds new 323e of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 FECA and 202 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 BCRA in part;
With respect to Titles III and IV, I join THE CHIEF JUSTICEs opinion for the Court. Because these cases are of such extraordinary importance, I cannot avoid adding to the many writings a few words of my own. Who could have imagined that the same Court which, within the past four years, has sternly disapproved of restrictions upon such inconsequential forms of expression as virtual child pornography, Ashcroft v.
For that is what the most offensive provisions of this legislation are all about. We are governed by Congress, and this legislation prohibits the criticism of Members of Congress by those entities most capable of giving such criticism loud voice: national political parties and corporations, both of the commercial and the not-for-profit sort. It forbids pre-election criticism of incumbents by corporations, even not-for-profit corporations, by use of their general funds;
To be sure, the legislation is evenhanded: It similarly prohibits criticism of the candidates who oppose Members of Congress in their reelection bids. But as everyone knows, this is an area in which evenhandedness is not fairness. If all electioneering were evenhandedly prohibited, incumbents would have an enormous advantage. Likewise, if incumbents and challengers are limited to the same quantity of electioneering, incumbents are favored. In other words, any restriction upon a type of campaign speech that is equally available to challengers and incumbents tends to favor incumbents. Beyond that, however, the present legislation targets for prohibition certain categories of campaign speech that are particularly harmful to incumbents. Is it accidental, do you think, that incumbents raise about three times as much hard money the sort of funding generally not restricted by this legislation as do their challengers? See FEC, 1999-2000 Financial Activity of All Senate and House Campaigns Jan.
Was it unintended, by any chance, that incumbents are free personally to receive some soft money and even to solicit it for other organizations, while national parties are not? I wish to address three fallacious propositions that might be thought to justify some or all of the provisions of this legislation only the last of which is explicitly embraced by the principal opinion for the Court, but all of which underlie, I think, its approach to these cases.
In any economy operated on even the most rudimentary principles of division of labor, effective public communication requires the speaker to make use of the services of others. An author may write a novel, but he will seldom publish and distribute it himself. A freelance reporter may write a story, but he will rarely edit, print, and deliver it to subscribers. To a government bent on suppressing speech, this mode of organization presents opportunities: Control any cog in the machine, and you can halt the whole apparatus. License printe...
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