The Democrats were furious that the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case last fall that corporations and unions could fund ads supporting or opposing candidates for federal offices during the critical periods before elections and primaries. Facing an election bloodbath in November, they were desperate to find a way to gain some advantage. They passed the DISCLOSE Act yesterday by a vote of 219 to 206. Two Republicans joined the majority Democrats. DISCLOSE stands for the Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections Act. The light is only cast on corporations. It is not cast on large unions, the NRA, the AARP, or the Humane Society. Obama supports the bill and wants the Senate to pass it.
Democrat Representative Jared Polis of Colorado said that corporations are "zombies consuming the flesh of profit." Therefore, corporations should forfeit their freedom of speech. They should also understand how vehement the Democrat hatred of business activity is from this statement and from this act. One would think that business would learn that Democrats cannot be trusted with power because they are strongly opposed to people's freedom to earn a living.
The bill requires not that disclosure of who paid for the ad be available or on file, but that the CEOs of funding companies must appear in the TV ad or talk on the radio ad and disclose their funding of the ad. This will take so much time that 15 second ads will become useless to corporations. The more expensive 30 second ads will have more like 15 seconds of content. In addition, corporations with $10,000,000 of government contracts will not be allowed to run election ads at all. Companies with 20% foreign ownership or which are 5% owned by a foreign nation also will have no freedom of speech. It is clear that this bill is unconstitutional.
The Democrat dirty trick to remove the democratic voice of businessmen from elections, was compounded by their favorite legislative dirty trick of disclosing the content of the DISCLOSE bill only the day before the vote. Then that dirty trick was further compounded by only allowing 1 hour for the debate on the bill on the House floor! This, after the House allowed 41 hours of floor time for the naming of new post offices!!!! This is a mind-boggling display of hatred for business.
The two idiot Republicans who voted for the DISCLOSE Act are Joseph Cao of Louisiana, who has a record of voting for awful Democrat bills, and Mike Castle of Delaware. Mike Castle is running for the Senate after serving 9 terms as a Representative. If he wins the election, he would complete the four years left on Joe Biden's seat in the Senate. It appears that Mike Castle is a RINO, which may not be too surprising given that he runs for election in Delaware. Suppressing freedom of speech is very popular in Delaware, as the highly restricted speech allowed at the University of Delaware makes very clear.
Never allow anyone to get away with the statement that Democrats believe in freedom of speech and Republicans suppress it. In recent times, it has been clear that Democrats are more inclined to suppress the freedom of speech than are Republicans. Of course, it should be so clear that the suppression of the freedom of speech is unconstitutional that no party could get away with anything like the DISCLOSE Act. It will likely be declared unconstitutional, but the Democrats are counting on it taking too long to get to the Supreme Court for them to rule that freedom of speech will prevail in the November 2010 election which has the Democrats now shivering in their hob-nailed boots.
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