“Congress shall make no law respecting … the freedom of speech …”
Amendment 1, US Constitution
How is it possible to get Congress to pass a law restricting the people from speaking freely about political candidates around election time? Well, if you have $140 million dollars, you can do just that.
It turns out that The Pew Charitable Trusts, the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy , the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Joyce Foundation, George Soros' Open Society Institute, the Jerome Kohlberg Trust, the Ford Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation came up with almost all of this sum.
The leader of this cabal was one Sean Treglia who explained the strategy:
Charged with promoting campaign-finance reform when he joined Pew in the mid-1990s, Treglia came up with a three-pronged strategy: 1) pursue an expansive agenda through incremental reforms, 2) pay for a handful of "experts" all over the country with foundation money and 3) create fake business, minority and religious groups to pound the table for reform.
"The target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington," Treglia says — 100 in the Senate, 435 in the House. "The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot — that everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform."
Why were our elected representatives ready to go along with this charade? Well, as one of the Senate leaders of this movement, Senator John McCain explained, he really, really dislikes attack ads aimed at him. It makes it so much easier to get re-elected if your opponents are prevented from revealing unpleasant things about you around election time.
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