Polar opposites stand up for free speech
New disclosure rule brings liberals, conservatives together in opposition

(James Wigderson is a blogger publishing at http://www.wigderson.com and a Waukesha resident. His column runs Thursdays in The Freeman.)

The cliché is that politics makes for strange bedfellows. The mind reels at the thought the Wisconsin Club for Growth and One Wisconsin Now could ever find common ground. But when their rights to freely organize and to freely speak are threatened, then there is common cause.

Pun intended, as Common Cause is one of those groups that would place themselves in the role of speech police. But I get ahead of my tale.

The Government Accountability Board (GAB), given broad powers by the state Legislature to regulate political speech, has formulated a rule that would require full disclosure of donations to organizations that engage in certain types of speech.

So what, you may ask? Wasn’t this disclosure required before? Well, yes and no.

The Supreme Court held that groups expressly advocating for the election or defeat of a candidate can be required to fully disclose their donors. The standard for “expressly advocating” required the use of certain key words, such as “elect” or “vote for.”

The GAB, supported by such groups as Common Cause and the terribly misnamed Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, has decided to expand the scope of its regulation to include any group whose advertisements can be interpreted as expressly advocating someone’s election or defeat in an election, without the aforementioned buzzwords as triggers.

The GAB can impose the rule even if the ad is centered on a particular issue, as political ads often are, rather than focused on the defeat or election of a particular candidate. As long as the GAB can discern an attempt to influence an election’s outcome, it will have the power to require the full disclosure of the organization’s donors.

The standard for regulation is now more subjective thanks to a failure of the Democrats in the Legislature to fulfill their obligation to the First Amendment. The Legislature has the power to overrule the GAB, but the Democrats in control chose not to.

It would seem to most observers that full disclosure of donations to political organizations would be to the public good. However, we have the lesson of California’s debate over a constitutional amendment to define marriage as reserved to a man and a woman. Activists opposed to the amendment used the disclosure laws in an attempt to intimidate, threaten and harass the amendment’s supporters mercilessly.

It’s always been known that disclosure would have the unintended consequence of chilling public speech. The country’s Founding Fathers understood the consequences when they published the Federalist Papers under pseudonyms in support of our constitution. For that matter, the one exception to the current disclosure requirement, the Communist Party, was exempted precisely because its members possibly faced retaliation.

But as we’ve seen again and again, attempts to “reform” our election laws are not really reforms, but restrictions. They are the result of a bias in favor of limiting speech rather than ensuring the maximum participation in our democratic process.

Organizations are now faced with an inexact standard of speech requirements that may cause them irrevocable harm. How are they to know which ad on which issue might inspire the caprice of the GAB? And if they should incur the GAB’s regulatory hand, what will be the consequences for them and their donors?

Many years ago, when Christopher Hitchens was in Cuba, he asked a Cuban movie director if he was free to criticize Fidel Castro. The director replied that, other than the ability to criticize Castro, the freedom of conscience and creativity was absolute. Hitchens replied that if the leadership of the state was immune from criticism, “then all the rest was just detail.”

Thanks to the GAB and its supporters, we are just wrestling with the details. It is in this atmosphere that two organizations, “dogs and cats living together” in Bill Murray’s memorable phrase, have set aside their differences to challenge the power of the state to limit their rights of association and speech. I suspect One Wisconsin Now and Club for Growth will be successful in a battle that never should have been necessary.

Perhaps the next Legislature will take their responsibilities to safeguard our rights a little more seriously.

Why did you choose to write a memoir?
I suppose the effect of becoming 60 on me was stronger than I thought it was going to be. I took it quite heavily and began to review my life a lot more than I had before.

Did you write the book for money?
Of course, I do everything for money. Dr. Johnson is correct when he says that only a fool writes for anything but money. It would be useful to keep a diary, but I don’t like writing unpaid. I don’t like writing checks without getting paid.

I trust you answer the e-mail of your friends at no charge.
I haven’t got to the point yet where phone calls and e-mails are billable, but I am working on it. That would be happiness defined for me. What I’m hoping is to get a 900 number, so I can tell all my friends, “Call me back on my 900 number: 1-900-HITCH22.” I can talk for a long time.

But who would want to listen?
That would be the 900-number test.

Ann Althouse focuses on the interview questions concerning the suicide of Hitchen’s mother. I think she missed one possible explanation for Hitchens’ answer. If a man does not believe in an afterlife, could he ever see a reason for suicide?

We might play the game of how we would answer the question. For me, the temptation would have been to give in to my inner Christopher Hitchens, and I would have told the caller that the Earth is not 10,000 years old but billions, and we should not pretend to believe in the 10k Earth anymore than we believe in phrenology and astrology. I would hasten to add that had “Creationist” been a category at the time of this country’s founding, I sincerely doubt that we would have found Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin among them.

Instead of the clever title I chose above, we would have to title this, “Why I am not a candidate for public office.”

I have two thoughts regarding Wall’s answer, which can be seen below:

Ht: Blogging Blue

The first thought is about the caller. The question just doesn’t ring true to the ear. Perhaps someone who believes in Creationism will correct me, but the self reference as a “Creationist” and the charge of hypocrisy sounds more like a secularist leftist than a fundamentalist Christian. A sincere caller would have just “corrected” Wall on his terminology.

That said, while Wall seemed surprised by the question, given that the topic under discussion was global warming and not evolution, I fail to see the harm in Wall’s answer. He did not agree with the caller’s point but merely said it was irrelevant to the topic. If I have a quibble it’s with his remark that he just “threw out a number.” But that’s the clumsiness of an unprepared candidate.

Back in May, just as Egypt’s anti-porcine hysteria was gathering pace, there was a proposal from Sheik Ahmad Ali Othman, a senior advisory figure at the Ministry of Religious Endowments, that all pigs be killed because they were the descendants of those unbelieving Jews who were turned into swine in the Quran. (In case you don’t follow this very toxic debate between contending schools of militant Islam, there are those who maintain that Jews are the spawn of the pigs and monkeys into which Allah turned the heretics, and those who take the more moderate view that the heretics turned into pigs and monkeys were further cursed by being made barren and sterile. The latter view leads to the slightly more lenient and broad-minded conclusion that, bad as today’s Jews are, they at least cannot be in a direct line of descent from the original condemned beasts. These fine distinctions are worth knowing.)