The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech by Kimberley Strassel

Author:Kimberley Strassel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2016-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Government Shutdown

Senator Susan Collins is a Republican, but she’s a Maine Republican, which means she’s something a little different. The Pine Tree State is tough territory for conservatives, and Collins has held on to her seat by bucking her party on key issues. One of these is campaign finance law. She voted with Democrats on McCain-Feingold, and she has long publicly embraced greater “transparency.”

Collins was also one of those rare Republicans who, at least in the early years, expressed a willingness to try to work with Obama. So it was something in the spring of 2011, still early in the Obama tenure, to see Collins fuming and rallying the entire Congress to oppose a presidential action. It isn’t easy to get her that mad.

The catalyst came on April 20, 2011. White House press secretary Jay Carney took to the podium. Yes, the rumors were true. Obama was contemplating (yet another) executive order, this one to force any federal contractor to disclose its donations to groups that participated in politics.

Those rumors had started the day before, when Hans von Spakovsky, the former Justice and FEC Republican, posted an explosive blog on PJ Media. “An impeccable source has provided me with a copy of a draft Executive Order that the White House is apparently circulating for comments from several government agencies,” he wrote. That order would seek “to implement—by executive fiat—portions of the DISCLOSE Act.” He quoted his source as saying, “It really is amazing—they lost in the Supreme Court, they lost in Congress, they lost at the FEC, so now the president is just going to do it by edict.”

Von Spakovsky went on to detail the contents of the order. It would require any potential government contractor, and its directors and officers, to divulge as part of its bidding process any contributions made to political parties or organizations. Even more intrusive, it would require contractors to disclose any money to independent groups that might use that money for political ads. Von Spakovsky pointed out that the focus on “transparency” for companies was largely a ruse, since federal contractors had already long been barred from making any contributions to political parties or to candidates.

No, this was a backdoor way of delving “into the personal political activities of their officers and directors—and require them to report political contributions those employees have made, not out of corporate funds (which is illegal), but out of their personal funds,” wrote von Spakovsky. It was also a way of outing otherwise anonymous corporate donations to nonprofit groups. The backlash would then intimidate companies out of such speech.

Carney was quick to spin this as “reform” and “transparency” and to suggest that U.S. taxpayers had a right to know how federal dollars being paid to contractors were being used in campaigns. Free-speech advocates rolled their eyes. The order didn’t cover federal employee unions, which negotiate contracts—paid for with taxpayer dollars—far in excess of government contracts. The White House wasn’t forcing them to explain how they used their dollars.

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