Regulations like these are for your own good because we are the government and our only concern is your welfare. You can trust us on that or we will shut you down so fast it'll make your head swim. Have a nice day.
Posted on 12/30/2006 7:45:04 AM PST by Valin
What?
Why?
Free Speech Coalition Responds to Claybrook on Pelosi Anti-Grassroots Lobbying
http://wwww.examiner.com/blogs/tapscotts_copy_desk/2006/12/27/Free-Speech-Coalition-Responds-to-Claybrook-on-Pelosi-AntiGrassroots-Lobbying
December 27, 4:00 PM
Lots of readers commented on my column published last week in The Washington Examiner on an expected proposal from incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that would force grassroots-based citizen lobbying campaigns to register with Congress while exempting Washington lobbyist for Big Labor, Big Business and Big Government.
Public Citizen's Joan Claybrook is developing the proposal with Pelosi and responded last week to a critique by a group of conservative grassroots activists who make up the Free Speech Coalition.
Go here to read the Public Citizen response.
Here's the Free Speech Coalition's letter to Claybrook. It is lengthy but well worth reading. The letter signer is with one of the member groups of the coalition:
Ms. Joan Claybrook
President
Public Citizen
215 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE
Washington, DC 20003
Re: Grassroots Provisions in Lobbying Reform Are
Unconstitutional Intrusion on Privacy
Dear Ms. Claybrook:
Your December 21 letter to Free Speech Coalition, Inc. defends Speaker-Elect Pelosi’s attempt to require small grassroots causes to report as lobbyists and disclose their associations to Congress by the mere communication to as few as 500 members of the general public. In that letter you state, “[i]t does not in way (sic) infringe upon the First Amendment for the public to know the identity of a speaker in the marketplace of ideas . . .”
The premise of your attempts, then, are not only contradicted by the Bill of Rights and American case law, but by Public Citizen’s own admissions.
Public Citizen’s December 15 press release, “Publisher of GLBT Magazine Cannot Force Disclosure of Anonymous Reporter’s Identity,” admits to the importance of privacy, even anonymity, that is accorded to certain speech and publication. The Public Citizen news release states, “This case demonstrates how easily the constitutional right to anonymous speech can be threatened . . . [and that] individuals and companies do not have the right to know the identities of their anonymous critics and Internet service providers are not required to disclose them . . .” See http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/print_release.cfm?ID=3440.
Liberals historically have defended the privacy of association and the right to anonymous political speech. Justice John Paul Stevens, for example, wrote the majority opinion in McIntyre v. Ohio Election Commission, 514 U.S. 334 (1995) protecting the anonymity of speakers on political issues.
In NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 449 (1958), Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote:
It is beyond debate that freedom to engage in association for the advancement of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of “liberty” assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which embraces the freedom of speech. . . . It is hardly a novel perception that compelled disclosure of affiliation with groups engaged in advocacy may constitute [an] effective restraint on the freedom of association . . .
Your letter also states that registering and reporting to Congress falls under a “right to know.” There is no such right in the Bill of Rights of Congress having a right to know who their critics are, and historically American jurisprudence has protected privacy and anonymous speech for that reason.
GayNewsWorld, from Public Citizen’s press release, other Internet communicators and many other small causes would be required to report quarterly and disclose to Congress by merely urging citizens to contact Congress. Communications agents and vendors who provide services to such speakers would also need to disclose to Congress the speakers themselves.
Your bill targets those who do not have Washington lobbyists, and who do not provide money, gifts or junkets to Members of Congress, but who merely communicate with as few as 500 people urging them to contact Congress. Requiring grassroots causes and their agents to register and report quarterly to Congress will result in silencing many small, unpopular and even controversial speakers both by the costs of reporting and penalties for failures to report, and by the mere disclosure of and by those who merely provide services to those causes.
Congress should be listening to the People, not listening in on them.
Very truly yours,
Mark J. Fitzgibbons
President of Corporate and Legal Affairs
American Target Advertising, Inc.
Why?
Because they can....or at least they think they can.
-That’s the lesson forgotten by the Republicans who were given the opportunity of a dozen years to start putting Big Government back in its place and thereby protect individual freedom.
This is insane--and will be thrown out in any decent Federal Court as a First Amendment violation.
"as Publius noted in The Federalist Papers, no “parchment barrier” like the First Amendment is going to prevent those in power from telling the rest of us how to live."
Which is why there's a Second Amendment.
You mean it's not about hunting, and target shooting?
/smirk
I assumed the same thing when "campaign finance reform" was going through congress. I guess the president assumed as I did because he signed the dammed thing, much to my dismay. I sailed through the judicial process and was upheld by the SCOTUS.
I wonder if Bush will sign this one.
The Swift Boat Veterans' success in stopping Kerry really got to the Democrats. They can't protect their collection of defective politicians from the truth without instituting such measures.
/blush
This is insane--and will be thrown out in any decent Federal Court as a First Amendment violation.
Ya mean like McCain-Feingold?
Isn't that what we said about McCain- Feingold?
No doubt there will be lots of good government jobs involved in monitoring this horsesh*t.
Those rats are fixated on controlling every aspect of "their" people, aren't they?
They are no different than every other socialist, fascist, communist regime before, during and after them.
Regulations like these are for your own good because we are the government and our only concern is your welfare. You can trust us on that or we will shut you down so fast it'll make your head swim. Have a nice day.
Major Alert ping.
This is aimed directly at FR and other conservative websites and blogs.
Who does she think she is, everyone's mommy?
You are sadly mistaken. Perhaps you have forgotten what the Supreme Court had to say about McCain-Feingold. The Constitution no longer protects political speech, only speech intended to overthrow our form of government.
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