Amazing… The Left figures out that campaign-finance reform can be dangerous to its First Amendment health:
Protect Your Right to ACT – Contact Your Senator Now
Between the Tom DeLay ethics scandals in the House to Bill Frist’s “nuclear” assault on the Senate filibuster, it’s really good to be in the Majority. If you don’t like the rules, change them. But they still have more power-grabbing moves up their sleeves.
The U.S. Senate is considering legislation (S. 271 and H.R. 513 - “527 Reform Act of 2005″) that would severely limit your ability to have a voice and an impact on the political debate.
ACT needs your attention now.
Last year, you helped ACT empower millions of voters in the most important election cycle of a generation. We made history and, together, built the foundation for a new kind of political campaign—one based on conversations with neighbors, not television sound bites.
Over 101,000 individual contributors gave generously seeking change—not political access. You helped us revitalize community politics and train the next generation of political organizers throughout the battleground states.Passage of this legislation could change all of this. The 527 Bill would force independent Section 527 organizations like ACT, unions, advocacy groups, and other non-profit Section 501(c) organizations to use highly regulated and restricted federal PACs for much of their public advocacy and voter mobilization activity, even if non-partisan.
Essentially, this would limit the involvement of millions of individuals and organizations who work to mobilize, educate, and empower voters on the federal, state, and local levels. Help fight this aggressive assault on political free speech.
This legislation will skew federal election law more in favor of big business, stalwart backers of the GOP political agenda by allowing them to continue to spend for political purposes with no tax consequences, while non-profits risk both being taxed at the highest corporate rate on their political spending, and a loss of their tax exemption privileges.
The proposed 527 legislation goes far beyond the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act often known as “McCain-Feingold”. McCain-Feingold had a clear, necessary, and praiseworthy purpose: it took members of Congress out of the business of asking lobbyists and special interest fat cats for large unregulated donations, while preserving the free speech rights of American citizens to come together and express their views to Congress. This new bill overreaches and misdirects new and complex regulation against the already disclosed and independent activities of non-profit organizations, unions, and advocacy groups that pose none of the dangers that federal campaign finance law is designed to address.
Former Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign manager (now RNC Chairman) Ken Mehlman has credited – “ACT’s turnout prowess with helping keep Kerry within 119,000 Ohio votes of winning, and with the ability to keep future Democrats within striking range. We take their competitiveness very seriously.” (Wall Street Journal, 12/22/04.
Clearly they do, indeed, take us seriously.
It’s easy to point to an example like the Swift Boat Veterans’ attack ads as something we can all agree is unseemly. But this legislation is not really about “cleaning up politics” as they say. There’s more to it. For example, co-sponsor Trent Lott, who is leading the charge for a speedy passage, has never been a fan of reform until now. In fact, in 2002 he voted against McCain-Feingold at every turn! The New York Times noted in one editorial that Lott had spent years “using every parliamentary trick to block a fair vote on campaign finance reform.” The New York Times, 2/27/02
This bill is about silencing your progressive voice. Please don’t let that happen.
Contact your Senators today. Urge them to stand up for your right to ACT.
We can’t wage this fight without you.
Of course, as Byron York recently pointed out, now the 527 money is flowing to 501(c)(4)s.
Good to see that the Left is finally seeing the light on this so-called reform! In reality, McCain-Feingold was (and is) nothing less than an all-out assault on the Constitution, designed to insulate incumbents from messy criticism (you know, democracy). As should be abundantly clear by now, the right to speak out against our government should not be considered a “liberal vs. conservative” issue; it should be properly addressed as what it is-a free-speech issue.
Amazing how now they see it as being against “progressive” groups. “Progressive” groups supported by Soros and Lewis and the Hollywood contingent are the ones who used the McCain Feingold facilities to bypass what would not have been permitted in the past. Now they want to call this a “free speech” issue. It was then but the “progressives” would never admit it. Funny how having your own ox gored grabs the attention of the LLL contingent.
So the left changed the rules and still got their ass beat! Poor Liberals, when will they figure out it’s the message, not the messenger? Socialism is a failure, capitalism acomplishs what socialists dream about. If the Democrats want to reverse their decline, they will have to change their message. That means trashing 50 years of doctrine. If they don’t, the party will fracture. It will split into Libertarians and Greens. That would be a bad thing, since American government needs a Loyal opposition to fuction properly. The Democratic party has been taken to the woodshed the last 3 elections. Without some serious change they will get spanked again in ‘06 and ‘08.
Stehpinkeln:
While you are right that a major party is in danger of splitting apart, with one of the resulting fragments being libertain-ish types, it is not the Democrats. The socialist Left won that battle a long time ago; the Democrats are fast becoming monolithically (and soon, openly) socialist. Real “libs” of either stripe haven’t been in control there since the sixties.
It is the Republicans who are in danger of splitting, because of the tension between the free-market, relatively secular libertarian wing, and the theocratic wing. Merely being anti-socialist is not enough to keep them together, especially when the kinships between socialism and theocracy are realized.
Lastly, if such a split occurred, it would be a good thing — because it would force a political realignment much more akin to the real political alternative of freedom vs. tyranny. As both theocracy and socialism are species of the latter, that would truly be superior to having merely two inverted checkerboards to choose from.
Seerak, your mistake is in overestimating just how much influence the Religous right has in the Republican party. That is understandable, since the Religous right makes the same mistake. No, the major issue in the Republican party is along the lines of government size and it’s handmaiden, Taxes. President Bush made a strategic error is chosing to deal with Social Security before Taxes.
As the Demonrats become more socialist, their power base will shrink.
Main Entry: lib·er·tar·i·an
Pronunciation: “li-b&r-’ter-E-&n
Function: noun
1 : an advocate of the doctrine of free will
2 a : a person who upholds the principles of absolute and unrestricted liberty especially of thought and action b capitalized : a member of a political party advocating libertarian principles
I’m not sure just what you mean by libertarian, so I posted the Merriam-Webster definition. I haven’t seen any libertarians that were willing to be pinned down on just what they mean. Maybe they don’t know.
Sorry for the heavily delayed response Stehpinkeln, but someone emailed me about my comment here and linked back, and since that email is connected to what is currently my “vanity” blog (i.e. one I’m not actively promoting), I didn’t get it until now.
The primary piece of evidence supporting my position is that while Republicans talk the small-government talk, few (if any) walk the walk, and it’s for a very good reason; cutting any government program (and here “cutting” means reducing or eliminating, not merely throttling or cutting the rate of growth of its funding) will instantly result in screams of “heartlessness”, images of the people “hurt” by the cuts splashed all over the place by media, and other attacks wielding the one ideological weapon that is so powerful only Objectivists are proof against it: the altruist morality.
The self-sacrifice ethic which unites Christianity and the Left still dominates the Republican Party, even if card-carrying Christians don’t. So never mind what they *say*; look at what they do.
The term “libertarian” as I used it was loosely meant to designate those who, despite their conservatism, show a heavy Ayn Rand-like emphasis on individual rights and capitalism (examples being Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams) The tension in the Republican Party is ultimately between this “selfish” ideology and the self-sacrifice ethic that unites Christians and the Left.
That tension does not exist amongst the Democrats; over there, they are all supporters of the sacrifice of individuals to the common good. If there are Ayn Rand-alikes amongst the Democrats, I’d like to know who they are.