In favor of free speech

on Jan 29 in Politics tagged by Trevor Hicks

I honestly have a hard time understanding why the left is so outraged at the Supreme Court’s recent trashing of McCain-Feingold, which was nothing more than a blatant incumbent’s protection racket.  I have a hard time understanding how it is that permitting people to say or write whatever they want, even if they pooled their resources together in a corporation to do so, is somehow undermining democracy.  If the right of an individual to do so was never in question, it’s nice to know you don’t require the fortune of a Ross Perot, George Soros or the Koch family to have your say on a national media platform.

I’ve read this decision described as enabling a corporate takeover of our government.  Excuse me?  That ship set sail 60 years ago, I fail to see how our government could be any more under the control or influence of large companies and unions and still retain the right to vote for its citizens.  And further to that point, if we don’t trust citizens to be able to appropriately weigh the value of information they receive based on its source, then why the heck do we even want them voting at all?  And what about the vaunted marketplace of ideas that supposedly motivates the First Amendment?  It’s not clear to me at all why the government should be in the business of constricting that flow of ideas.  Remember, this isn’t just about giving ExxonMobil the freedom to buy political ads on national TV, it’s also about the right of the Sierra Club, the ACLU and the NRA to do it as well.  If the decision restores the microphone in front of groups you find distasteful, it does so equally for the other side as well.  Why should we be afraid of freedom?

This decision is long overdue and will help to expose the records of candidates and particularly incumbents to the scrutiny in full public view that permits a fully informed decision by the electorate.  Is the left more concerned with empowering citizens or controlling them by carefully filtering the messages they are allowed to receive?