Mark Tapscott: Pelosi preparing new shackles for free speech

WASHINGTON - Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has cooked up with Public Citizen’s Joan Claybrook a “lobbying reform” that actually protects rich special interests and activists millionaires while clamping new shackles on citizens’ First Amendment rights to petition Congress and speak their minds.

Pelosi tried earlier this year to move H.R. 4682, the “Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2006,” which is now cited by Public Citizen’s Web site as the vehicle it is helping the incoming speaker to craft for the new Congress. The proposal Claybrook is helping craft for introduction early in 2007 is expected to be essentially the same bill Pelosi put forth this year.

That is bad news for the First Amendment and for preserving the kind of healthy, open debate that is essential to holding politicians, bureaucrats and special interests to account for their conduct of the public business.

The key provision of the 2006 bill was its redefinition of grassroots lobbying to include small citizens groups whose messages about Congress and public policy issues are directed toward the general public, according to attorneys for the Free Speech Coalition.

All informational and educational materials produced by such groups would have to be registered and reported on a quarterly basis. Failure to report would result in severe civil penalties (likely followed soon by criminal penalties as well).

In addition, the 2006 bill created a new statutory category of First Amendment activity to be regulated by Congress. Known as “grassroots lobbying firms,” these groups would be required to register with Congress and be subject to penalties whenever they are paid $50,000 or more to communicate with the general public during any three-month period.

In other words, for the first time in American history, potentially millions of concerned citizens involved in grassroots lobbying and representing viewpoints from across the entire political spectrum would have to register with Congress in order to exercise their First Amendment rights.

There is even more bad news here, though, because the Pelosi-Claybrook proposal includes loopholes big enough to protect Big Labor, Big Corporations and Big Nonprofits, as well as guys with Big Wallets like George Soros. Big Government, you see, always takes care of its big friends.

The Pelosi-Claybrook proposal builds on the restrictions on free speech created by campaign finance reform measures like McCain-Feingold that bar criticism of congressional incumbents for 30 days prior to a primary and 60 days before a general election.

What we are witnessing here is the continuing repeal of the First Amendment. If Pelosi-Claybrook becomes law in 2007, you can be sure it will be followed by more regulations and restrictions on free speech in 2008 and beyond.

The next steps after forcing grassroots citizen lobbyists to register with Congress will be the steady encroachment of congressional inquisitors into determining whose messages are fit for the public and whose are not. Any guesses on what the officially approved messages will say about things like waste and corruption in government?

That’s what Big Government does — it keeps getting bigger and bigger and, 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.

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.

So now we have Nancy Pelosi and Joan Claybrook deciding what kind of grassroots lobbying the rest of us can do.

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.

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