The McCain/Feingold crackdown on free speech

There's really no other way to put it.
Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over.
In just a few months, he warns, bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign's Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate's press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines.

Smith should know. He's one of the six commissioners at the Federal Election Commission, which is beginning the perilous process of extending a controversial 2002 campaign finance law to the Internet.
The campaign finance law was a disaster in the first place, and did absolutely nothing close to its original aims. It does need reforming, but nothing even remotely close to the type of reforming that will take place under these proposed changes. Captain's Quarters explains what it really means:
The FEC, thanks to a John McCain lawsuit, will have to calculate the value of a link on a political website in order to determine whether the owner has overdonated to a campaign -- in other words, committed a felony. Bigger blogs will come under closer scrutiny, which means that any expression of support on CQ with a referential hyperlink may well get valued at more than the $2,000 maximum hard-cash contribution.

In order for me to operate under those conditions, I will need to hire a lawyer and an accountant to guide me through the election laws and calculate my in-kind donations on almost an hourly basis. How many bloggers will put up with that kind of hassle just to speak their minds about candidates and issues? John McCain and Russ Feingold have effectively created an American bureaucracy dedicated to stamping out independent political speech, and the courts have abdicated all reason in declaring it constitutional.
Jon Henke adds this take:
The law implies that, in the last 60 days or so of an election, the New York Times or CBS can publish with impunity. Non-traditional media, as the law now stands, must cease political reporting or other activities of any kind that supports a particular candidate. If they do not, they are liable to FEC fines for, well, publishing their political opinions, under the theory that to do so is to give an in-kind contribution to a candidate.

So, the Washington Post has free speech, but QandO does not, once you cross that time threshold prior to the election.
Captain Ed's also got a must-read letter to John McCain where he goes into more detail, and Mark Coffey's also got a good letter. I hope you're beginning to see the problems here. Publicly supporting a campaign, or linking to it on the internet would be counted as having a financial value that will undoubtedly be a pain in the neck to figure out. Bloggers would not be able to link or endorse candidates as easily in the two months prior to an election, and will have to think twice about even linking to campaign related websites.

Wizbang predicted "The Mother Of All Blogstorms," and it's already quite accurate. The hatred for these reforms goes across all political boundaries - the biggest guns on the left, MyDD, Atrios, Jeff Jarvis and DailyKos on the left are all against it, as are Polipundit, Captain's Quarters, Michelle Malkin and others on the right. If you have a blog, and haven't blogged about this yet, I'd strongly recommend doing so, and sending trackback pings to help show the widespread nature of the outrage against these proposed amendments

Via Michelle Malkin, we can see how Senators and House members voted on the original Campaign Finance legislation. 95% of Democrats supported it in the House, compared with barely 20% of Republicans, while only three Democrats voted against it in the Senate. Rathergate points out that the Democrats would be stupid to support the reforms in similar numbers, while sending a warning to the FEC:
Both sides of the blogosphere need to pool together and stop this thing. I think we will see a unification on this issue – with the Nov. 2 election and the Democratic Party’s loss of the MSM as a reliable toady, the Democratic Party now relies on the Internet as much as anyone else.

We’ll be watching the media and how they play this potential legislation. But for you Fourth Estate types who may be reading this, keep in mind that shutting us up will in no way restore your credibility. Americans never really trusted the press to begin with – the Internet just gave us a way to voice it.
If the reforms do get through, I for one will not pay any attention to them. Sure I'm an Australian and they probably don't apply to me. But I hope that American bloggers from both sides will defy the laws and continue to blog - I'll happily chip in hundreds of dollars to their legal costs if it gets that way, regardless of their political persuasion.

An attack on the free speech of a blogger - no matter where they place themselves on the spectrum - is unacceptable. This is an attack on all bloggers that cannot be tolerated.

(Cross-posted to The House Of Wheels.)

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