This past weekend marked the two-year anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United.  Protesters, dubbed Occupy the Courts, gathered at the Court to voice their disapproval of the decision:

As Institute for Justice campaign finance expert Paul Sherman explains in the video above:

The irony of those protests is that you had groups of people getting together to speak out against a Supreme Court decision that protected the right of people to get together and speak out.

Indeed, people should not lose their right to free speech simply by exercising their right to freely associate.   And when people group together—be it on the steps of a courthouse, in the form of a trade union or as a corporation—they don’t lose their freedom to speak out.

Occupy the Courts protesters also mistakenly believed that the Citizens United ruling held that “money is speech.”  In fact, the Court never said that.  Rather, it ruled correctly that money facilitates speech.  And if the government has the power to control how much money you can spend speaking, then it effectively can control your speech.

Importantly, the law in question in the Citizens United case empowered the government to fine and even imprison ordinary people for engaging in certain types of speech.   The government argued in court that it had the power to ban videos and books.  I don’t believe that many Americans, including the Occupy the Courts protesters, think the government should be in the business of banning books.

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It’s official.  I have returned to my Liberal roots, and have chosen to embrace Liberalism as I did from birth until 1994.  It makes no sense to fight the tsunami of government anymore, and the truth is, Liberals have had it right all along.  I was completely brainwashed by right-wing talking points, and during a session with my masseuse, she opened up some chakras that wiped my mind clear.

No longer having a mind, I’m putting my intellect to work on making Liberal policies work with maximum impact.  I hope Big Government readers can forgive me.  Your close-mindedness and hate speech cannot hold a candle to doing what is right.

Healthcare

As a Resurrected Liberal, I strongly endorse government intervention to protect people, primarily from themselves.  People have shown they are not capable of personal responsibility or making good choices.  They eat too much.  They drink too much.  They are too stupid to know who the best candidate is.   Therefore, I endorse a Universal Health Care option that, among other things, will tackle several epidemics in our country.

Obesity, for example, is running rampant.  The First Lady has made it her project to get people to eat healthy and trim down.  The problem is that a lot of people just won’t listen, and they are going to eat bad food no matter what they get told, and no matter how often they get the USDA Food Pyramid shoved in their face.

I propose a tax be instituted on all people who exceed their ideal body weight, as determined by the Department of Health.   The tax should really hit fat people hard, because once their pocketbook lightens, they will, too.  I suggest a $1000 tax per pound per year per person.  When they visit their doctor for their free health care, the doctor will record their weight on a standardized scale that a government factory will produce, populated with unionized government employees at a flat salary of $90,000 per year, plus a pension that will have contributions made on their behalf as part of their employment.

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I recently took a two-day trip down to Palm Springs to attend an event called “Uncloaking the Kochs” hosted by Common Cause. Accompanied by my dear friend, former assembly candidate Alvaro Day, I traveled as an independent investigative journalist, and not in any official capacity on behalf of Big Government or Breitbart.com (though I was pleasantly surprised to run into a familiar friend of mine on rollerblades jovially inviting everyone to Applebee’s).

Among Common Cause’s, well, common causes, are campaign finance reform, net neutrality, outlawing the filibuster, promoting cap and trade, and in this particular case, herding a mass of protesters outside a nearby hotel to yell at Charles and David Koch for being conservative and rich.

Unfortunately several “haves” have missed the memo that you’re not to be both rich and conservative at the same time, and that bankrolling your pet causes is an extra no-no if you’re conservative—thus exempting left-wing billionaire philanthropists George Soros (from whom Common Cause has received $2 million over the past eight years) Peter Lewis, John Doerr, Julian Robertson, Nicolas Berggruen, and many others from being yelled at too. (more…)

Karen Sampson and her Colorado neighbors just won a serious victory for liberty.

In a unanimous decision on Tuesday, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Colorado’s disclosure laws for grassroots political groups.  This is a big deal.  As the Associated Press put it, “The issue is ripe for an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

The federal appellate court held that Karen and her neighbors in the tiny subdivision of Parker North, Colo., should not have been forced to register with the government and comply with burdensome campaign finance laws simply for opposing a ballot issue involving the annexation of their neighborhood.

I wrote previously at Big Government that Karen and her neighbors opposed an effort to annex their town into a neighboring city because it would raise their taxes without providing them benefits.  So they printed up fliers and yard signs.  And then they got sued.

Under what basis?  Colorado’s campaign finance laws, which state that any group of individuals that spends over $200 magically becomes an “issue committee” that is forced to register with the state.  Further, they had to track and report all their “contributions” and “expenditures” and disclose the identities of anyone who gave them money.

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There’s a new site to add to your blogroll:  Congress Shall Make No Law.

The site, which has the address makenolaw.org, empowers grassroots activists from around the country that are standing up and saying no to unconstitutional attacks on free speech coming in the guise of campaign finance reform.  The site explains all the latest news and events going on in this increasingly complex area of law.  All of the writers are First Amendment attorneys and experts at the Institute for Justice (IJ)—the libertarian law firm dedicated to striking down campaign finance laws in state and federal courts.

The unfortunate reality is this:  Campaign finance laws are a way to regulate speech and silence speakers.  And they have seriously negative impacts on everyday Americans.

Consider Karen Sampson of Parker North, Colorado:

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No recent Supreme Court ruling have evoked more liberal fury than Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a campaign-finance case involving government censorship of a political documentary called Hillary: The Movie. The Federal Election Commission prevented the anti-Hillary Clinton film from being shown on television just before the 2008 Democratic primaries, a decision that was upheld by lower courts. Siding with The First Amendment, the Court struck down laws regulating independent political advertising by for-profit and non-profit corporations before an election even as they reaffirmed rules about disclosure and disclosures for ads and against direct corporate giving to candidates.

Critics fear that corporations will now overwhelm the political marketplace with commercials and advertisements that will program citizens to vote for whatever agenda “the corprations” want at a given moment.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann railed against the decision, calling it “a Supreme Court-sanctioned murder of what little democracy is left in this democracy” and comparing it to the notorious Dred Scott decision, which ruled that  had no rights under the Constitution. His fellow corporate media host at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, exclaimed, “If you are a regular person who has ever made a campaign donation before, forget about ever having to do that again. What’s the point?”

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Thursday, in his resounding defense of the First Amendment in the Citizens United decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority:

…[w]hen Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.

“Censorship” is a dirty word in America, and that is why the restrictions at issue in our case were cloaked in the guise of “campaign finance reform.”  But the fact remains that any restrictions on political speech, especially those that criminalize such speech, send us down a very slippery and very dangerous slope.

Last March, our government argued in court that it has the Constitutional authority to ban books that mention a candidate for federal office.  The government later retracted that statement, but is there any doubt that such a statement never would have been made if there had not been 100 years of progressively more intrusive restrictions on political speech preceding it?    Had the Court not acted, what was to prevent the government from asserting that authority over the internet, which does not have the benefit of two centuries of tradition and jurisprudence protecting it?

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