FEC may crack down on bloggers

Quote:

Wednesday, March 16 2005  

Agency may impose speech restrictions on Internet political activity


WASHINGTON - The Federal Elections Commission (FEC) is considering extending political speech restrictions found in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law to those who engage in political speech on the Internet. 

While the FEC had previously voted to exempt the Internet from the McCain-Feingold speech regulations, an activist judge overruled the Commission last fall.  Because of the Democrats on the Commission, the FEC does not have the votes necessary to appeal the judge's decision. 

Forwarding a political candidate's press releases via e-mail, or possibly even linking to a campaign website in an e-mail or blog could soon be considered campaign advertising, and subject to the regulation of political speech found in the McCain-Feingold law. 

"This is exactly what the opponents of McCain-Feingold feared," said Tom Readmond, executive director of the Media Freedom Project.  "Blogs have been hailed as the democratization of politics, allowing individual citizens a louder voice than they've ever had before.  It therefore stands to reason that the bureaucrats in Washington want to get busy regulating this kind of political speech." 

"Congress needs to step in and clarify this issue," continued Readmond.  "Members of Congress need to hear from their constituents that they won't stand for this kind of speech regulation.  Speak now, while you still can."

So much for freedom of speech.

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It would be interesting toknow why this "activist" judge ruled this way. You can't blame te FCC for this action, it had already stated that they were going to exempt the Internet but the judge pretty much told them that they couldn't. Now they need to have a vote on the subject and the left on the board won't vote on it. I wouldn't blame the govt per say, but I would blame those in teh Dem party that you support for not allowing a vote to take place to amend the act.

Judge Kotelly was appointed by Chief Justice Rehnquist to serve as a member of the Judicial Conference Committee on Financial Disclosure from June 2000 through May 2002, and in May 2002 Chief Justice Rehnquist appointed Judge Kotelly to serve as Presiding Judge of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court , which is a 7-year appointment.

In a case pending since Spring (Docket No. 02-1984), District Court Judge Kollar-Kotelly found mostly in favor of plaintiffs-Congressmen Shays and Meehan in their challenge to various of the rules promulgated by the FEC to implement McCain-Feingold (Shays-Meehan). The judge found some key rules to be defective under one of two prongs of the standard review set out in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Res. Def. Council, 467 U.S. 830 (l984): failure to follow clearly expressed Congressional intent, or to adopt a permissible construction of the statute. She held other rules to have been adopted with inadequately reasoned justification, or with inadequate notice, in violation of the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act. The Court, having reached these conclusions, declined to specifically enjoin the enforcement of the rules, but instead remanded them to the Federal Election Commission for further action consistent with the opinion.