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March 08, 2005
More Useless Condescending Claptrap
The Democracy Project today pointed out an op-ed by Ellen Weintraub, one of the members of the FEC who voted against appealing a decision last year that required the FEC to regulate the internet in order to comply with BCRA.
The op-ed begins with the sentence “Bloggers of America, chill” and continues:
Reports of a Federal Election Commission plot to "crack down" on blogging and e-mail are wildly exaggerated.First of all, we're not the speech police. We don't tell private citizens what they can or cannot say, on the Internet or anywhere else. The FEC regulates campaign finance. There's got to be some money involved, or it's out of our jurisdiction.
BCRA is all about policing speech. And for pete’s sake, just because some reports may be exaggerated does not mean that they have no merit. People who did not even want campaign finance reform to begin with are obviously going to have issue with more regulations of that nature. You can’t just dismiss all of them as reactionary wackos.
And unlike what she asserts, money does not have to be involved for the FEC to be involved. The contribution merely has to have some monetary value. Bradley Smith said in his interview that, for instance, if someone were to spend some small amount of money sending out letters for a campaign, and those letters raise a large amount of money, that the FEC would consider the monetary value of the act to be equal to the amount of money raised. As I pointed out in my last post on this subject, with a little juggling of numbers, the value of a link on Instapundit to a candidate’s website could be well over $2000, even though it would probably only cost pennies in terms of time and bandwidth. As for email, if the FEC can value letters that are sent out, there’s no reason for it to not be able to value email.
Wizbang also points out that in 2004 when they donated the use of a BlogAd to a campaign, they were required to sign a disclosure stating that they were donating the value of that BlogAd to the campaign. Plus since the FEC already regulates paid ads on the internet, what else could new regulations be about but regulating unpaid ads and in-kind contributions.
I just can't wait to see the regulations these guys are going to come up with.
Update: Wizbang has more, including a link to the fisking of the statements of John McCain and Russ Feingold regarding this issue. La Shawn Barber has a round up of posts on the subject.
Posted by illuminaria at March 8, 2005 04:15 PM