Isn't a blogger who doesn't take contributions free to post anything, anytime?
Bradley Smith is one of the six Federal Election Commissioners tasked with extending the 2002 Campaign Finance Law into the Internet. Some of his thoughts and statements:
In 2002, the FEC exempted the Internet by a 4-2 vote, but U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly last fall (2004) overturned that decision. "
The commission's exclusion of Internet communications from the coordinated communications regulation severely undermines" the campaign finance law's purposes, Kollar-Kotelly wrote.
Q: Would a link to a candidate's page be a problem?
A: If someone sets up a home page and links to their favorite politician, is that a contribution? This is a big deal, if someone has already contributed the legal maximum, or if they're at the disclosure threshold and additional expenditures have to be disclosed under federal law.
Q: How can the government place a value on a blog that praises some politician?
A: The FEC did an advisory opinion in the late 1990s (in the Leo Smith case) saying that if you owned a computer, you'd have to calculate what percentage of the computer cost and electricity went to political advocacy. It seems absurd, but that's what the commission did. And that's the direction Judge Kollar-Kotelly would have us move in.
Q: How about a hyperlink? Is it worth a penny, or a dollar, to a campaign?
A: I don't know. But I'll tell you this. One thing the commission has argued over, debated, wrestled with, is how to value assistance to a campaign.
Corporations aren't allowed to donate to campaigns. Suppose a corporation devotes 20 minutes of a secretary's time and $30 in postage to sending out letters for an executive. As a result, the campaign raises $35,000. Do we value the violation on the amount of corporate resources actually spent, maybe $40, or the $35,000 actually raised? The commission has usually taken the view that
we value it by the amount raised. It's still going to be difficult to value the link, but the value of the link will go up very quickly.
Q: Then what's the real impact of the judge's decision?
A: The judge's decision is in no way limited to ads. She says that any coordinated activity over the Internet would need to be regulated, as a minimum.
Q: How do you see this playing out?
A: This time, we couldn't muster enough votes to appeal the judge's decision. We appealed parts of her decision, but there were only three votes to appeal the Internet part (and we needed four). There seem to be at least three commissioners who like this.
Senators McCain and Feingold have argued that we have to regulate the Internet, that we have to regulate e-mail. They sued us in court over this and they won.
Q: Why wouldn't the news exemption cover bloggers and online media?
A: Because the statute refers to
periodicals or broadcast, and it's not clear the Internet is either of those. Second, because there's no standard for being a blogger, anyone can claim to be one, and we're back to the deregulated Internet that the judge objected to. Also I think some of my colleagues on the commission would be uncomfortable with that kind of blanket exemption.
Q: So if you're using text that the campaign sends you, and you're reproducing it on your blog or forwarding it to a mailing list, you could be in trouble?
A: Yes. In fact, the regulations are very specific that reproducing a campaign's material is a reproduction for purpose of triggering the law. That'll count as an expenditure that counts against campaign finance law.
bjbarron notes: I was part of a blog alliance that raised tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars last year for the military. There were blogs that did the same for political candidates on both sides of the aisle.
Under Mc-F, a complaint by a trailing candidate could, at the minimum, trigger the shutdown of your blog at your ISP...at worse it could lead to fines based on the amount of money raised by the leading candidate.
Would this be nearly impossible to enforce...yes. Would they care...no. They would just find some way to shut you down and make you spend the time and money to prove them wrong.
Note that both moonbat and wingnut bloggers are on the same side on this one...the first time I have ever seen that.
Link to the Smith Article
