If you use Twitter and follow politics, you’re probably used to seeing candidates tweet. Sometimes they are fun. Most are deadly dull. And every now and then, Twitter becomes a politician’s downfall.
Only a bureaucrat could see this and decide it’s not heavily regulated enough. Sure enough, that’s what the three Democrats on the Federal Election Commission decided last week.
They are exasperated that Republicans on the six-member commission wouldn’t go along with them and insist that accounts in these and other social media include the same tedious disclaimers that you see and hear on political television ads and websites.
The only thing that saves the innocent public from having to endure these grating and unnecessary disclaimers on Twitter and YouTube is gridlock at the FEC.
Minor though this dispute is from all outward appearances, it is nevertheless a token of something much more sinister going on. Many Democrats in Washington, driven into a frenzy by their pious desire to control political speech, would sooner dilute the First Amendment than allow political groups to tweet without regulatory disclosures.
Theirs is not just a notional aversion to freedom. In 2014, no fewer than 54 Democratic U.S. senators actually voted to amend the Constitution to weaken First Amendment protection of political speech. They hoped to impose plenary authority for states and the federal government to limit spending on the dissemination of opinions and advice about voting in elections.
The Left is stubbornly impervious to evidence that their faith in campaign finance regulation is misplaced. Does money really buy elections? If you think so, ask Jeb Bush. His campaign and his super PAC beween them spent $130 million in a forlorn effort to make him president this year. He didn’t even get a whiff of the nomination, let alone the White House, dropping out after winning only four of the 1,237 delegates he needed. That’s $42.5 million per delegate.
In contrast, Donald Trump is spending record low amounts of money per delegate won. He has barely advertised on television or radio, and he has a minimal paid campaign organization.
But don’t stop there. Ask casino magnate Sheldon Adelson about 2012. He spent $15 million trying to make Newt Gingrich the Republican nominee. Aside from the $20 million he subsequently spent on Mitt Romney, Adelson threw $19 million at various congressional races, losing nearly all of them. He spent nearly $100 million beyond that on other Republican groups in a losing effort to turn back the tide of a Democratic year.
In 2014, the hedge-fund billionaire-turned-global-warming-crusader Tom Steyer spent $74 million to influence a variety of races at the federal, state and local level. He utterly failed to achieve his goal of making climate change a big issue in the midterm elections. Voters rejected nearly all his preferred candidates, from Maine to Colorado, and Florida to Iowa.
That same year, Lawrence Lessig started a super PAC to advocate for campaign finance reform, of all things. He spent $1.6 million in little New Hampshire to boost a candidate in the Republican Senate primary, who was crushed on election day.
The truth is that all the money in the world cannot make people care about issues that don’t matter. If people, either individually or in groups, are free to say what they want as much as they want, a good message can beat big money. If you keep losing on your issues, that’s obviously a big problem. Which is presumably why the anti-political-speech crowd is foaming at the mouth.
