Do Conservatives Really “Plot”?

I found the headline to this article interesting: “Conservatives plot on campaign finance”

I don’t know about you all, but I don’t find “plot” to be a particularly neutral word. It smacks of a bunch of guys sitting around cooking up nefarious schemes and, in this context, those nefarious schemes are aimed toward getting over on the American people.

And that’s not what’s happening. Conservatives, pretty much from the very beginning, have opposed campaign finance reform. The biggest reason for their opposition isn’t even mentioned in the article, which is another point against it. They oppose McCain/Feingold (which is the main target of their challenges) because it prevents every one of us from using our Freedom of Speech.

Here’s one way your freedom of speech is abridged. One of the things McCain/Feingold does is to prevent any ads within a certain time before the election, from mentioning a candidate by name. That means that if you and I and a couple of our friends think that Representative Schmuckatelli is wrong on Proposition X and his challenger is right, we can’t put our money together to buy a TV commercial to say so on the evening before Election Day. We can’t mention Representative Schmuckatelli at all.

Does that sound right to you? Well, it doesn’t to conservatives. We believe that if you want to spend your money on political television commercials, you should be able to do so. Now, we conservatives also believe that there should be pretty wide-reaching disclosure laws, which means that if we pool our money and buy that commercial, there’s going to be a public record that says who we are and how much we spent. But that’s fine. We ought to be able to see who is spending what money on what issues and candidates. Conservatives have been fighting for that for a lot of years.

What we don’t want is for politics to be influenced almost solely by shady rich guys who can throw their money around like Mardi Gras beads. That’s what progressives do (*cough*GeorgeSoros*cough*). That’s antithetical to democracy. The article could have at least mentioned that and it’s a pretty big deal that it didn’t.

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Tags: Campaign Finance Reform, Conservatives, Free Speech (?), Progressives

Category: General