The McCain Feingold Corruption Act

McCain-Feingold was such an obvious effort to restrict free speech that I watched in amazement as it passed congress, was signed by the President and then confirmed by the Supreme Court. I never understood how this could happen. After all, the first amendment is now interpreted so broadly as to define a crèche in a park as the establishment of religion, but telling people they cannot organize to endorse political candidates within 60 days of an election is NOT “abridging the freedom of speech?”

How did this movement got started and who paid for it is the subject of this revealing essay at TechCentralStation.

Here are some revealing facts:

Consider a report just out from the folks over at Political Money Line, "Campaign Finance Reform Lobby: 1994 to 2004." Ignored by the media to date, it details how the supposedly grass-roots campaign-finance reform movement has been funded over the last decade to the tune of $140 million. Of that $140 million, the vast majority ($123 million) came not from retirees scraping together their last nickels for the cause of democracy, nor from schoolchildren collecting deposits on cans plucked from dilapidated playgrounds.

No, the money came from just eight ultra-liberal foundations (including the Ford Foundation and George Soros' Open Society Institute), the same folks who fund: the Earth Action Network, the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, the Naderite Public Citizen Foundation and the Feminist Majority Foundation.
[snip]
Yet, by maintaining the fiction of independence from one and other, they appear to much of the press to be a pack of scrappy underdogs sinking their teeth into the ankles of the big-money men.

Well, it's a sham. It's a charade. It's a lie. They are the big-money men. And, with the release of the Political Money Line report, it's time the media started treating them as such. The billionaires and liberal foundations constantly calling for more restrictions on the freedom of ordinary Americans to assemble and speak are not a movement -- they are a lobby.

And the first lobbyist who should be called out is none other than the Reformer-in-Chief, Sen. John McCain. The senator has been caught with his pants down this week, accepting what are essentially campaign contributions to a phony think tank called the Reform Institute.

Read the whole thing.