Posted on 03/15/2006 6:44:41 PM PST by Jean S
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) yesterday postponed a controversial decision on subjecting Internet political speech to campaign-finance regulations, raising the stakes for today’s scheduled House vote on a bill that exempts all blogs, Web ads and other online communications.
The heated debate over a proposal by Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) to exclude online content from the “public communications” covered by campaign-finance law has engulfed every corner of the political world, splitting both Democrats and Republicans and pitting mainstream editorial boards against left- and right-wing bloggers.
The House Rules Committee scheduled a meeting late yesterday to determine the ground rules for debate on Hensarling’s bill, as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) joined Reps. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) and Marty Meehan (D-Mass.) in calling for an up-or-down vote on an alternative plan from Reps. Tom Allen (D-Maine) and Charlie Bass (R-N.H.).
FEC Chairman Michael Toner has thrown his weight behind the Hensarling bill. The bill attempts to resolve a federal court mandate for clear congressional guidance on how the commission should apply the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law to the Internet.
The court ruled last year in response to a complaint filed by Shays and Meehan and supported by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russ Feingold (D-Wis.). The McCain-Feingold law bans parties and federal candidates from raising and spending unlimited “soft money” donations, which can come from any entity, such as corporations, labor unions or individuals.
A hopeful Allen challenged the Rules Committee and House leadership, including Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), to allow his and Bass’s alternative a vote.
“Boehner said he would consult with more people and listen to members and, I hope, run the House in a different way,” Allen said, “and I would hope a bipartisan substitute would be allowed.”
Two of the Web’s most famous blogs, the liberal Daily Kos and the conservative RedState, have trumpeted the Hensarling bill since it failed on the suspensions calendar during a November vote, falling short of the two-thirds majority needed for passage but snagging more than half of the House. The bloggers of Daily Kos, RedState and other online forums argue that the Allen-Bass alternative, which would provide targeted exceptions from the law for individuals and some websites, would force them to register as political committees.
Allen did not dispute that possibility. He noted that his bill would allow websites unrestricted operations as long as their annual expenditures did not exceed $10,000.
“They might well have to file,” Allen said of blogs as large as Daily Kos, “but that’s the point. If the Internet becomes more important, the types of financial abuses that occurred within the campaign-finance system in general” are more prone to occurring.
“We want [the Web] to become as free as it possibly can without undermining the entire campaign-finance-reform legislation,” he added.
Many Democrats, along with a pack of centrist Republicans, have echoed Allen and Bass’s concerns, questioning whether the Hensarling bill would encourage labor unions and corporations to take advantage of the online exemption and spend soft money on Web advertising. Pelosi issued a statement clarifying that her support of the Allen-Bass bill did not equate to a crackdown on bloggers’ right to free speech.
“I will not support attempts to subject everyday bloggers to Federal Election Commission regulations or silence the rights of Americans to go online and voice their opinions,” Pelosi said.
Hensarling, a member of the conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC), has enlisted a Democratic ally of his own in Rep. Zoe Lofgren (Calif.), a Rules Committee member who helped him circulate a “Dear Colleague” letter this week. Lofgren cited the support of Democratic campaign-finance lawyer Bob Bauer for the Hensarling bill, charging the bill’s critics with spreading the “misconception” that its aim is to roll back McCain-Feingold.
“It isn’t true,” Lofgren said. “There has been a lot of rhetoric on this, fueled by editorials, that is simply mistaken.”
In the Senate, Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has sponsored companion legislation to the Hensarling bill, and Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) offered the bill as an amendment to the Senate’s lobbying-reform package late last week.
Two fellow RSC members, Reps. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) and Mike Conaway (R-Texas), have written defenses of the Hensarling bill for their own Web logs. Seizing on the populist appeal of the Daily Kos-RedState partnership, Kingston titled his post “Elitist Media vs. Blogs.”
Progressive bloggers, meanwhile, were circulating an FEC comment submitted in November by three watchdog groups that have vocally opposed the Hensarling bill, citing the comment as evidence that the bill’s opponents want to regulate blogging as partisan political speech.
The comment, signed by leaders of the Center for Responsive Politics, Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center, urges the FEC to deny a press exemption to a liberal blog based on its work on behalf of Democratic candidates.
“These purely partisan goals may be appropriate for a political organization, but they do not qualify a group as a ‘press entity,’” the watchdogs wrote.
Now we will have to offshore our Constitutional freedoms. Dump CFR!
A ping list for important stuff is needed.
I missed this yesterday!
Howlin, here's what we missed.
March 16th date --- NOT yesterday.
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