Online Freedom of Speech Act Introduced in House

Fox Cutter writes "Today in the House of Representatives, Congressman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) introduced a companion piece of legislation to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's bill (S.678) to exclude the Internet from the definition of 'public communication' in the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002." If the bill passes, this would free the internet from FEC regulation.

Comments

Re:That is closer to the truth than you think

[metlin]

It's spelt Israel, not Isreal.

Re:That's my Congressman!

[geekee]

" Sorry but... why pass a law to establish the first fucking amendment?"

Because they've already passed laws involving political speech that violate the 1st amendment in the name of "fairness" in political campaign finance. Now they're writing laws to exclude the internet since the older laws would otherwise include the internet.

You may be interested in the exact text

[goon america]

You can find an exact copy of bill S.678 here in PDF and here

It says simply

Paragraph (22) of section 301 of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (2 U.S.C. 431(22)) is amended by adding at the end the following new sentence: `Such term shall not include communications over the Internet.'.

Now, let's google a little further for the bill that this bill amends. Strangely it's missing from any of the summaries I've seen. Ah, here it is (warning: large PDF).

Here's the text of the section being amended (431:22):

(22) Public communication. The term 'public communication' means a communication by means of any broadcast, cable, or satellite communication, newspaper, magazine, outdoor advertising facility, mass mailing, or telephone bank to the general public, or any other form of general public political advertising.

The last bit of emphasis I added. Just as an exercise, let's see how this would look as amended:

(22) Public communication. The term 'public communication' means a communication by means of any broadcast, cable, or satellite communication, newspaper, magazine, outdoor advertising facility, mass mailing, or telephone bank to the general public, or any other form of general public political advertising. Such term shall not include communications over the Internet.

So, this bill would exempt all campaign regulation relevant to advertising spending so long as it was on the internet.

Re:No exceptions for censorship

[arbitraryaardvark]

You put that well, although I disagree.
Every time the government imposes censorship on election speech, it undermines the integrity of the election process.

Let's be clear here that the bill would not prevent the FEC from censoring the internet. It would amend section 301 of BCRA, to clarify the issue in Shays-Meehan v FEC, which requires the FEC to revisit rulemaking on applying section 301 to the internet.
The public comment period for that rulemaking is now under way, and we need slashdotters to take part and be heard. www.fec.gov.

There are other placs in BCRA, such as 311, that attempt to censor campaign speech, and this bill will not fix those problems. Even before BCRA, the FEC, relying on 317 of FECA, has been trying to censor the internet, and we've been fighting it.

This bill is typical of what congress does. It passes a stupid law under pressure from special interest groups. Here the special interest group was the Pew Charitable Trust, which spent ~100 million to pass BCRA (McCain-Feingold).
This turned out to have unforseen consequences on another special interest group, in this case bloggers, so a bill is being introduced to cater to that interest group. And so it goes.

It's not about making sense or doing the right thing - it is about responding to stimuli, like an amoeba does.
By all means let's support this bill. Whether it passes or not, the support it gets is a measure of how much clout we have.
But it doesn't fix the problem, just provides some grease for the squeakiest wheel. Kudos to Declan at cnet and Commissioner Brad Smith and Mike (Krepanski?), Michelle Malkin, the instapundit,
the three thousand of you who have signed the coalition's petition.
But there's much more work to do to free the internet from state and federal regulation of political speech.
I blog about this stuff at ballots.blogspot.com.
One of the best sources to keep up with these issues is Rick Hasen's http://www.electionlawblog.com.
I try to do what I can, but frankly I need either help from other lawyers, or somebody with deep pockets, before I take on the FEC in court.

Re:Fair Speech

[WoodstockJeff]

Political contributions were judged by some people in Washington, often referred to as "The Supremes", to be a form of political speech, exercised by supporting those candidates whose views mirror your own. "Political speech" is what the First Amendment particularly protects.

Of course, another group in Washington decided to pass laws that impose limits upon how much political free speech you can do about any particular federal candidate, and later passed more laws saying you couldn't do so much free speaking when it comes to the party of your favourite candidates.

But they get around that by allowing you to send an unlimited amount of free speech to a licensed-by-the-government organization to spread it around TV and radio stations, so long as no one can tie the control of those organizations back to the political parties or candidates. Which is going to get very interesting here soon, since one of those organizations, MoveOn.org, is now claiming they're going to "take back control" of one of those parties...

And, of course, none of this takes into account money spent by people hiring relatives of political office holders to sit in Washington and lobby congress, getting very favourable legislation passed with the help of their personal Senator or Representative.