The Wall Street Journal offers a good take down of the arguments for the Export-Import Bank, which the House just reauthorized for another 6 months. One irony in this debate, which the Journal notes: many on the left, including the Obama administration, Elizabeth Warren, and Nancy Pelosi, support the Ex-Im bank despite their real antipathy for business and their professed antipathy for “the rich” obtaining benefits at the expense of everyone else. As the Journal explains, “these liberals are friends of business only when government is allocating the favors.” That’s true, but the issue goes deeper than handing out favors.
Freedom of speech is under siege. Not by the “amplified” voices of billionaires and corporations, but by the sundry spokesmen for “the public” demanding that government should have the power to silence individuals via campaign finance laws.
Two weeks ago, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on whether to amend the First Amendment in response to Citizens United and other campaign finance decisions that allegedly allow the rich to “buy” elections and prevent “ordinary” Americans from being heard.
In his latest op-ed, published on Breitbart.com, ARI’s director of legal studies Steve Simpson argues that campaign finance laws threaten the individual’s right to free speech, because they rest on a severely mistaken view of the meaning of free speech.
Steve Simpson, director of legal studies at ARI, was recently interviewed by Education News about the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in McCutcheon v. FEC and other issues relating to campaign finance law and freedom of speech.
Twenty-five years ago in Tiananmen Square, China’s Communist regime massacred student protesters who sought some measure of greater freedom. Since then, although China’s economy has opened up, the regime continues to muzzle dissidents and labors studiously to make people forget.
Michael Kinsley has a very sensible take on the Supreme Court’s McCutcheon decision that is particularly notable because he refuses to join the chorus of unfocused, hysterical complaints about money in politics emanating from many of his colleagues on the left.
In recent years, the Supreme Court has issued a spate of generally good campaign finance decisions that move steadily closer to treating free speech the way it should be treated — as an individual right. Last week’s decision in McCutcheon v. FEC, which struck down so-called “aggregate” contribution limits, is the latest example.
Molly Norris was a cartoonist for the Seattle Weekly, and although she’s still alive, she’s gone “ghost”: leaving her job, moving, changing her name, and essentially erasing any traces of her identity. For fear of her life.
