Soros Got Money Out of Politics?
January 13, 2004
George Soros supported campaign finance reform saying he wanted to get the money out of politics. He then gave millions of dollars to MoveOn.org, which has a new ad showing Bush pulling the rug out from under senior citizens and knocking them down. You can hear and see this ad in the links below.
That ad is actually tame when you consider another one entered into their contest that compares Bush to Hitler. Soros denied the comparison on CNN's Wolf Blitzer Reports Monday night, even though he was quoted as doing so in the Washington Post. You can hear excerpts from the interview in the audio link below.
The question Wolf forgot to ask, or maybe didn't have time to ask, would have been, “How can you finance campaign finance reform to take the money out of politics and then put up your millions to affect politics? Aren't you being a little hypocritical?” I would have loved hearing the answer to that question, but it wasn't asked.
He did get that exact question on another show, I think from Lisa Meyers. The answer (my paraphrase): "I comply with the law. If people are unhappy with that, let them change the law."
Congress would have us believe they are preventing corruption, or the appearance of corruption. Justice Scalia wrote: "But let us not be deceived. While the Government’s briefs and arguments before this Court focused on the horrible “appearance of corruption,” the most passionate floor statements during the debates on this legislation pertained to so-called attack ads, which the Constitution surely protects."
Tell the public what BCRA would do: imprison those who would start another political party, imprison those who would mention a legislator by name in a televised ad. How many people over the last 225 years would be found guilty under BCRA'S terms?
Justice Thomas was the lone jurist opposed to the disclosure provisions of BCRA 201 that allows “the established right to anonymous speech to be stripped away based on the flimsiest of justifications.”
Ironic, isn't it, that elected officials can only be spoken of as "he whose name cannot be spoken" while established corporations and unions must assume a false identity and perform compuslsory ventriloquism to speak publicly, and that individuals cannot remain anonymous.
An analogy to our nations' early days could be posed in which anonymous essays written by "Publius" were published in New York newspapers. Several of our Founding Fathers, Madison, Hamilton, Jay, could have been subject to federal penalties and imprisonment under BCRA.
What's frightening is that Congress will be looking to restrict further our rights of speech and association. The record is clear that more legislation is forthcoming.