Danny Taggart's Blogarama

A more-or-less daily dose of news, politics, techmology, and any random thoughts that pass through my head.

Thursday, April 14, 2005

House acts to exempt bloggers from McCain-Feingold

From RedState. Both the House and Senate have introduced bills to exempt "communications over the Internet" from McCain-Feingold speech restrictions related to campaign finance. Why the exemption? Because the FEC decided the internet is subject to the restrictions because it wasn't specifically exempted by Congress in the original legislation. You heard that right: if Congress doesn't specifically permit something, it is illegal.

Now, this explicit exemption becomes necessary. The net effect of it will be to legitimize the original legislation. It's a great divide-and-conquer strategy by the enemies of free speech. Once this exemption goes through, I'll bet bloggers won't be nearly as motivated to fight campaign finance restrictions on other media (those dinosaurs which we all hate anyway).

It would be better for the republic to fight this issue on free speech grounds. That people believe such a fight is unwinnable and therefore necessitates a compromise exemption is very scary.