Jim Rubens has a very long email; almost no one will read. It’s just too long. But the title is “The Conservative Role in Passing an Anti-Corruption Amendment.” So, as a favor to you, I’ll suffer through it, if only to remind you why the title is misleading and the premise is wrong.
This is all about money as speech. Jim thinks we can and need to get money out of politics. That it warps (corrupts) the results and is unfair to the people. I believe you neither can nor should try. And not just because at the root the far-left is behind every effort to limit the first amendment along these lines (and every other).
First, Jim sites surveys and polls as if this provides proof that Republicans should back these ideas.
I think the idea that any polled majority that is concerned with “getting money out of politics,” as it relates to speech is irrelevant. Mobs should not drive policy on natural rights. Besides, the odds are good those polled were not made to understand what we’d lose by passing laws or amending the constitution to stifle some speech because some people spent more money on it.
I’d bet that none of these surveys include how the progressive media has a vast monopoly on money used for political speech. How no amendment or law I have ever seen would impact that.
No one ever suggests preventing mega-media corporations from expensing tens if not hundreds of billions annually on reporting that is essentially an in-kind political contribution to center-left issue and candidate advocacy. On their ability to cheery pick news, angles, the stories they cover, and the stories they ignore.
This is all partisan political speech backstopped by big money — some of the biggest.
We could stop there and call it a day but this idea about managing speech in this way opens other doors.
The left is hellbent on silencing speech they oppose by passing bills to label words and ideas they disagree with as bullying or doxxing. Democrats in New Hampshire and Virginia are already pushing these types of infringements. I expect Democrats in other states will or have.
At the national level, Democrats are pushing (and promising) to overturn Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. This would make Google, Facebook, Twitter, and any social media or internet portal (like, say GraniteGrok) fiscally responsible for challenges to the third-party content shared through their portals. Effectively shutting them down as challengers to those left-leaning mega-media corporations I mentioned and silencing millions of opposing voices on all sides.
Ensuring their one-sided big money in politics monopoly by destroying its competition.
I don’t think Mr. Rubens is suggesting that we amend the constitution to silence the mega-media money influence (The Press) but you can’t get “money out of politics” without doing that. Did anyone who surveyed these Americans include that in their polling? I’d bet money they did not.
Near the end of his very long email, Mr. Rubens adds that,
So far, conservative principles and party pragmatism have not pried Congressional Republicans loose from their nearly unanimous opposition to an anti-corruption amendment.
This is the source of the title, I presume. All that to convince Conservatives to convince Republicans to support his waving the bloody shroud of the unconstitutional McCain Feingold reforms (put to death by the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision) to motivate a Constitutional amendment movement to silence political speech selectively.
No, thank you.
I would rather do battle from my free blog against big money media and their allies than undermine the first amendment as written.
I would recommend that Republicans and conservatives continue to oppose such movements not just to protect speech but to protect the press. Even though they spend tens or hundreds of billions on ideas that I oppose.
The Republic and liberty are actually safer that way.
