Bloggers Exempted From Campaign Laws

MaceyHW writes "The Federal Election Commission ruled today that the only online political activity subject to Campaign Finance Laws are paid advertisements on a third party site. Today's ruling extended the regulations to paid advertising as required by a 2004 Federal Court ruling, but explicitly exempted all other forms of online activity: 'For example, the rule says individuals can use union or corporate computers or other electronic devices for political activity, as long they do it on their own time and are not coerced to engage in such activity by the union or corporation. Bloggers would be entitled to the same exemption from the campaign finance law that newspapers and other traditional forms of media receive. "There will be no second class citizens among members of the media," [FEC Chairman Michael T.] Toner said.'"

Comments

Heh...

[Otter]

There will be no second class citizens among members of the media," [FEC Chairman Michael T.] Toner said.

Poor Michael Toner -- you know half his emails get bounced by spam filters. He should change it to T0n3r.

Thanks for the small favors

[jmorris42]

Of course the problem is that the question had to be settled by the FEC in the first place. It should be a no brainer, since after all; "Congress shall make no law...."

I await the day when we get enough strict constructionists on the Supreme Court to reverse their previous bad decisions, sweeping away McCain Fiengold and most other 'Campaign Finance Laws' that aren't limited to mandatory disclosure requirements. And even those have to go eventually, after all why can't someone donate anonymously? Yes we voters should normally be highly suspiscous of a candidate funded anonymously but I can theorize situations where it might be acceptable.

Re:Thanks for the small favors

[LordKazan]

You do not have a first ammendment right to give money to your candidate for the very reason that Money IS speech. The person with the most money has more of a voice, violating the right to equal representation of the other people in the district.

Not all exercises of a right are protected exercises: if that exercise infringes upon the rights of others then it is NOT protected - and SHOULD NOT BE.

The only way to remove the corporate-whore money culture from washington is to REMOVE ALL INDIVIDUAL FUNDING of Candidates. All money for an election should go into one pool, then all the candidates on the ballot should get an equal proportion. Want your candidate to be heard more? ok, but all the others have to be too - if your so convinced of the merits of your candidate than this shouldn't bother you at all.

At the same time we should switch to instant-runoff voting, and completely open sourced Evoting machines with strict auditing of code, and voter-confirmed paper audit.

Re:Thanks for the small favors

[amliebsch]

This is not really about giving cash to candidates. Even under your scenario: suppose all candidates are funded equally from a public pool. I, a private citizen, wish to dedicate my time and my checking account to persuading as many people as possible that candidate X is the best choice. Under your proposed system, is this permissible? Does it change if I encourage others to join me? If I encourage others to help me by volunteering? Help me with cash donations? What if I voluntarily do the bidding of the campaign manager? What if I try to guess what the campaign manager wants, and do it? What if I take money from the campaign?

Re:Thanks for the small favors

[wannabe-retiree]

"The person with the most money has more of a voice, violating the right to equal representation of the other people in the district."

That's quite a stretch. When person A has more of something than person B, YES, there is inequality, but NO it does not mean that person B's rights are being violated. There's a difference.

Re:Thanks for the small favors

[vux984]

All money for an election should go into one pool, then all the candidates on the ballot should get an equal proportion. Want your candidate to be heard more? ok, but all the others have to be too - if your so convinced of the merits of your candidate than this shouldn't bother you at all.

What makes you think campaign contributors are convinced of the merits of their candidates? Quite the opposite is true really, most campaign contributors know full well that what they want from their candidate is in their own best interests, and not in the best interests of the people in general.

Corporations in particular don't give a crap about whats best for the electorate. Their millions in donations are, first to convince a candidate to turn his back on the people, and second to win that candidate the election.

They likely wouldn't contribute any money at all in your system... which might very well be a positive side-effect. But its important to realize that probably the vast majority of all contributions are to support a candidate who will represent the contributors private agenda -- not because they are convinced that if the public could be made aware of his merits that they would select him.

Re:Thanks for the small favors

[spiritraveller]

I await the day when we get enough strict constructionists on the Supreme Court ...

There are no strict constructionists on the Supreme Court and there never will be, because there is no such thing as a strict constructionist. When a judge thinks the text is ambiguous he makes a decision based on what he thinks is right. Sometimes, they will even do this when people disagree on whether the text is ambiguous.

Scalia has done this. Thomas has done this. Rhenquist did it. Every single one of them has done it.

So have fun waiting on your strict constructionists. You might as well wait for Godot.

Re:Thanks for the small favors

[dada21]

I agree partially but mostly disagree with you.

You do not have a first ammendment right to give money to your candidate for the very reason that Money IS speech

Actually, money is time -- you get money when you save someone time in doing a service or providing them a product. The money they give you their time saved -- they received in doing the same thing for someone else. Rothbard's (free e-)book available here offers a simple explanation of what money is.

Because money is my time saved, I should be free to use my time (or time saved) as I want as long as I don't directly use that time to harm someone's person or property. If I want to use my time saved ("money") to promote something, I should be free to.

The difficulty I have with campaign finance laws is that they were written specifically to prevent me from using that time saved in the way I want to. They were written to keep both parties more powerful than the individual, and to also block any third party from using a smaller crowd of individuals to finance their elections.

The biggest problem with government today is that it is too powerful, taking over rights left to the individual. When a government gets powerful, it attracts the time-saved ("money") from powerful individuals. It uses this over-broad power to harm the masses at the profit of the few.

If you want to fix the system, you need to remove the powers they've taken against their Constitutional and ethical limits. Ridding Congress and the Executive Branch of their excessive powers will remove most people's desires to finance the elections in order to get favoritism-treatment (ie, cronyism).

The idea of public funding is bad because there are other laws preventing most people from getting on a ballot. The problem is not the funding, the problem is the power given to the elected.

Re:Thanks for the small favors

[jmorris42]

> For example, confiscating land for "public use" is quite clear and is vastly different
> than "private use that might ultimately provide some public good." It didn't take much for
> 95% of the population to agree on that after the travesty that was the Kelo ruling.

Actually Kelo was a good example of strict constructionism at work. The 'good guys', as opposed to the nimrods who yank new laws fully formed from their asses, on the court ruled against an outcome they clearly would have preferred and stuck to the law as written. The state constituition in question clearly permitted the action and the US Consitituition as a general rule only limits what the US Government can do. So they upheld the taking and noted that if the state laws were different they would have ruled differently, whereupon the outraged folks in the various states looked at their local laws and are in the process of making changes where needed.

Misleading tone

[kherr]

The tone of this post is misleading, making it sound like bloggers (online sites, actually) get special privilege. Nothing is farther from the truth. The FEC decision is that the internet community is to be held to the same standards as traditional media. This is a great thing, I just hope it holds. The FEC commissioners now get that the internet is just another media outlet, like print or television. In fact it is more egalitarian; the corporate owners of Gawker Media (for example) can't dictate the political bent of internet content the way News Corp. (FOX) or GE (NBC) can with their large-scale dominance of the limited bandwidth of television. There are hundreds of thousands of web servers on the internet, but only a few hundred broadcasters on both over-the-air and cable television.

Intrusive vs non-intrusive

[bagsc]

If you choose to go to a website, that's your choice. If they have a beowulf cluster with more bandwidth than God, with 100 live video feeds 24/7 for one candidate - you're choosing to go there, and it's not intruding on you. I don't care how they raised the money for it. IMHO, it's like visiting a campaign headquarters. That's public information.

And if I see one damned ad on TV, I want tougher regulations. That's intrusive. Like all this damned political spam. One deserves to be unregulated and one deserves to be banned.

Furthermore, if the RNC wants to have its own cable TV station (*coughox*) that it pays for, and the DNC wants one too, I don't see a problem with any amount of spending on that. As long as you can block those channels to prevent your kids from watching that trash...

Re:Intrusive vs non-intrusive

[RexRhino]

And if I see one damned ad on TV, I want tougher regulations. That's intrusive. Like all this damned political spam. One deserves to be unregulated and one deserves to be banned.

TV ads are no more intrusive than web pages. You do not have to watch stations with commercial advertisments if you dont want to. You could watch cable stations without commercial advertisments (or, ones that don't accept political adverts)... you could watch DVDs, etc. Throwing out the Bill of Rights because you don't like TV ads is a little extreme (the Bill of Rights makes no exceptions for political advertisment, and while things like pornography might be debateable there is no debate whatsoever that the First Amendment was supposed to cover paid political advertising. Paid political advertisments are political speech and undebatably protected by the First Amendment.)

The real danger when it comes to political propoganda is public education, not TV commercials. It really is debatable if TV commercials are all that effective. But no-one can deny the effectiveness of the public school system in molding political thought and changing political beliefs... and in most places, public education is compulsary, unlike TV ads.

Re:Great Chance for Bill O'Reilly Being President

[HTTP Error 403 403.9]

One of the most popular choices for president, among the blogger community, is Bill O'Reilly. He has a populist mindset, not a conservative one.

With the easing of restrictions on blogging in support of candidates, the bloggers will be out in force in 2008. O'Reilly has a good chance of becoming president if the damned leprechaun would just join the damned race.

What would his party platform be?

A hand on every (yah-yah), a vibrator in every (woo-hoo) and a falafel in every (meow)?

Not gonna happen.

[MsGeek]

Three words. O'Reilly. Falafel. Loofah.