Blog: Campaign Finance

Markos Moulitsas and right-wing counterpart Mike Krempasky wrote an
open letter appealing for online activities to continue to be exempt from campaign finance laws. They make several good points, some specific to the bill, some general. And others, like Lindsay Beyerstein, identify a few holes in Markos's and Mike's argument.

For one particularly salient point in the letter, they write, "H.R. 4194 would actually force [Websites] to seek counsel and comply with voluminous campaign finance law requirements, stifling and chilling grassroots political activity across the Internet." This is a very important point. The campaign finance laws are written with large organizations in mind, organizations who have lawyers to comply with campaign finance laws. Since the laws' aim is to reduce the effect of big money in politics, this makes sense. But the laws also affect small organizations and, potentially, Web sites, and those groups lack the resources to carefully study how to comply with the law; more importantly, if they lack such resources, then they are unlikely to be a corrupting influence on the political process.

What's missing in all this talk about exempting the Internet from campaign finance laws, however, is the fact that it's not just about the Internet. People are exploring countless new ways to organize politically; blogs are one such mechanism, but Drinking Liberally is another, and like blogs, it is a vibrant forum for political discourse that operates with very little money. But there is no reason that DL should be regulated more than DailyKos.

It's almost always a bad idea to write laws which specifically call out certain technologies. It's better, instead, to regulate conduct no matter what the medium or technology. The same holds true with campaign finance laws. Reducing the corrupting influence of big money on politics is a noble goal, but the specific laws should apply to online and offline organizations equally, in a way that allows large groups of people to organize without having to master arcane campaign finance laws, while also restraining well-funded campaigns and influences both offline and online.

I've always been very nervous about the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, and the initative to regulate Internet speech is a great example of why. Reducing the ability of those with a lot of money to corrupt the political system is a very worthwhile goal; reducing the ability of citizens to participate in the political process is very bad. Applying the McCain-Feingold rubric - requiring FEC disclosures, and counting anything that helps a candidate as an in-kind contribution - to all political activity, including individuals speaking out online or groups of people gathering for political purposes, will stifle both. We'll end up with a world where professional PACs can participate in the political process, but nobody else can. And that's just as bad a future as any the law is trying to prevent.

In the reactions to this on blogs and mailing lists, I've seen a lot of apt comparisons. Is it a contribution every time someone tells a family member about a candidate over the dinner table? Is a lawn sign a contribution equal to the value of renting billboard space on that street - potentially very high in a city?

The problem here is the same as one around copyright: individuals have become used to doing certain things, like singing songs to each other, giving books to their friends, or talking about candidates. The Internet allows these activities to suddenly reach orders of magnitude more people. People put home movies to music using popular songs all the time, but if they put them on the Internet, content industries can find out about it and sue. If I encourage my friends to vote for someone, that's fine, but if I do it online, millions of people might read that and suddenly it's something the FEC wants to regulate. But the law shouldn't drastically change our behavior just because we live in a more connected world and can communicate with more people.

Update: Fafblog gives a great satirical take on the same point:

The Medium Lobster's one complaint is that the judge's ruling doesn't go far enough. Certainly the excesses of the blogosphere will now be held in place, but how can there be true campaign reform when the spoken word goes unchecked? Every day, millions of Americans make unchecked and unregulated political contributions by making political endorsements on sophisticated verbal logs - or "verblogs," if you will - comprised of billions of currently untracked sound waves transmitted through the atmosphere. Until these words are properly tracked, counted, and restricted by the FEC according to the arbitrary limits of McCain-Feingold, American democracy will forever remain a prisoner of Big Speech.