Hillary Clinton targeting our First Amendment rights

Hillary Clinton wants to rewrite the Bill of Rights. All in the name of good government, of course. So what if the right of free speech gets mangled in the process.

Clinton has not only joined the chorus of mostly Democrat voices, along with a few misguided conservatives, in wanting to amend the First Amendment, but she says it will be one of the “four big fights” of her campaign for president.

“We need to fix our dysfunctional political system and get unaccounted money out of it, once and for all, even if that takes a constitutional amendment,” she declared at one recent campaign event.

That bit of faux piety came amid reports that Clinton and super pacs supporting her might raise $2 billion for her presidential aspirations. That would include, according to CNN, $100 million for a primary in which she so far has no declared opponent.

Outrage over money in politics is nothing new. The latest eruptions follow a Supreme Court ruling acknowledging that corporations and labor unions have the right to participate in electioneering and the rise of activist groups that aren’t required to disclose donors. That would be the “unaccounted money” that’s got Clinton upset. The right to anonymous speech, vital during the civil rights struggles to organizations like the NAACP, is again under attack in the 21st century, when supporters of unpopular causes have lost their jobs.

Angst over campaign finance has spawned a number of laws that, if you believe it is a problem, have only made the problem worse. As legislation restricted and dried up giving to candidates and political parties, money flowed to outside organizations like super pacs and social welfare groups that also exercise the right to participate in our politics.

Central to campaign finance control schemes is the argument that money and speech aren’t the same. It will be interesting to see if Clinton takes up that theme, given that she’s been known to charge $300,000 to give a speech.

The simple fact is that in politics, speech and money are inexorably linked. It takes a lot of cash to run a presidential campaign in a nation of 315 million people spanning a great continent. That’s true for Senate and sometimes House races as well.

Now come proposed constitutional amendments such as one to grant Congress the “power to regulate the raising and spending of money” in federal elections, and give the same authority to state legislatures. Yep, federal and state lawmakers would get to decide what their opponents could raise and spend to try to unseat the incumbents. How’s that for fairness? That will surely bring better government, right?

Worse, much worse, we know from recent experience that campaign finance schemes lead to attempts to suppress political dissent. The Internal Revenue Service used its power over tax-exempt organizations to target conservative and Tea Party groups, in other words critics of the Obama administration, with the result, a happy one for Democrats, of suppressing these right-leaning voices in the 2012 election.

The Wall Street Journal and National Review have reported how a partisan Democrat prosecutor in Milwaukee used a secretive and intimidating investigative process to persecute conservative supporters of Republican Gov. Scott Walker, a likely GOP presidential candidate. As documented by National Review’s David French, this included police, in one case with a battering ram, storming the homes of terrified conservatives in early morning raids for bogus campaign-finance-law violations. What’s more, under a “John Doe” law this prosecutor employed, the victims of these police-state tactics couldn’t call their lawyers and mount a public defense, French reported.

This IRS and Wisconsin abuses were targeted at conservatives by Democrat-led law-enforcement organizations.

In coming around to support the Bill of Rights, James Madison, the principal architect of the Constitution, wrote, “Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.”

Freedom of speech, press, conscience and assembly was made the First Amendment for a reason.

Email: shuntley.cst@gmail.com