On August 18, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a rather incredible comment. With polls showing roughly 70 percent of Americans believe the Cordoba Project mosque near Ground Zero is a bad idea (though a constitutionally protected one), and further that the apparent support voiced by the President and various liberal commentators for the mosque was causing a bleeding in Democratic support barely two months before the next election, the Speaker suggested that it would appropriate to have an investigation into the sources of political opposition to the mosque location. No further analysis of these grossly inappropriate remarks is necessary. As lawyers would say, res ipsa loquitur—”the thing speaks for itself.” Or, as the rest of America might say, “’nuff said.”
Or maybe not ’nuff said. For earlier this week, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York vowed to bring again to the Senate floor the so-called DISCLOSE Act, a blatantly partisan piece of legislation designed to institutionalize a Democratic edge in elections, in part through unequal treatment of unions and corporations, and in part through onerous disclosure provisions intended to intimidate and ultimately silence opposition to the Democrats’ agenda.
We have pointed out many times that no new disclosure is needed in federal elections. No serious argument has been made that current disclosure rules are inadequate for the legitimate interests of government and the electorate. There is a fine line between disclosure aimed at helping Americans keep tabs on their government, and disclosure aimed at helping the government—and powerful politicians such as Speaker Pelosi and Senator Schumer—keep tabs on the American people.
DISCLOSE is intended to do the latter—as Senator Schumer said, it was intended to intimidate speakers and thereby silence them, once the Supreme Court had held that Congress could not directly silence them in Citizens United v. FEC. The federal government wields enormous power in its ability to subsidize or tax, regulate or exempt from regulation, and, frankly, to investigate. This power has expanded at a remarkably pace in the past decade, accelerating even more since Democrats captured Congress in the elections of 2006 and President Obama was elected in 2008. As such, it is more important than ever to demand protections of our remaining civil liberties, including the rights to speech and to privacy.
In short, what DISCLOSE and Speaker Pelosi’s comments have in common is an intention to intimidate speakers opposed to the agenda of the ruling party, by threatening to misuse the power of government against them if they continue to speak.
The so-called reform community likes to rail against corruption. But this is corruption and misuse of office of the most egregious kind. And the reform community will, we predict, be silent on Speaker Pelosi’s comments. Which, I suppose, is better than their cheerleading of the DISCLOSE Act.
