THE
MCCAIN-FEINGOLD-QADHAFY
ACT
By
Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, Ph.D.
Minaret
of Freedom Institute
From
time to time I enjoy pointing out how certain good ideas that
the West has
adopted had their origins in Islamic thought.
For example, Umar ibn Khattab pioneered the concept of
full disclosure
when he enthusiastically complied with a citizen's demand to
know from where he
had gotten his cloak. The
McCain-Feingold
Campaign Finance Reform Bill seems to have gotten its
inspiration not from Umar ibn Khattab, however, but from Muammar
Qadhafy, a
somewhat more disputable fountainhead of Muslim thought. (A Western journalist
once noted that
Qadhafy's Green Book seemed to be inspired less by the Qur'an,
which it never
cites, and more by a really bad Arabic translation of John
Locke.) Now the
U.S. Senate seems intent on adopting
what may be the worst idea in volume 1 of the Green Book.
American
jurisprudence has, to this point, made a distinction between
campaign activity,
which is subject to regulation, and political speech, which must
be completely
free and unfettered. Thus,
the amount of
money you can donate to a particular candidate's campaign is
strictly limited
by law, but the amount of money you can spend promoting your own
views on
issues or criticizing the government is unlimited. This
distinction has lead to
concerns by some that so-called "soft money" is being spent
putatively to promote issues or to criticize government policy
that effectively
promotes the campaigns of particular candidates in ways that do
not violate the
laws regulating "hard money" expenditures. The challenge to those
who would impose
restrictions on soft money is to find a way to do it that does
not violate the
First Amendments absolute protection of free speech.
The
McCain-Feingold Act presumes to navigate these dangerous waters
by introducing
a distinction between spending by individuals and spending by
organizations. The
constitutionality of
this approach is being stridently debated, with cause. What struck me is how
similar to one proposed
by Qadhafy. In
volume 1 of the Green
Book, Qadhafy proposes to absolutely guarantee freedom of speech
for the individual
while totally subjecting social speech to the presumed will of
society. The means
of effecting this magic is by
permitting no governmental controls on the opinions of
individuals but totally
prohibiting anyone from speaking in a corporate or
organizational voice except
through the social mechanisms approved by his revolution. McCain and Feingold
seem to have adopted the
same litmus test in deciding which forms of soft money spending
are permitted
and which are not. Now,
apparently,
David Hurwitz can buy advertisements opposing reparations to
African-Americans,
but the American Muslim organizations cannot buy ads criticizing
Congressional
aid to Israel on the grounds that the former is an individual,
entitled to
freedom of speech, and the latter is are corporations, to be
denied it.
The
attempt at further regulation of political speech in this
country follows a
pattern that has been seen time after time in issue after issue. Regulations are passed
to try to solve a
perceived problem. When
the regulations
are sidestepped or gotten around, more Draconian legislation is
introduced
which is also sidestepped or simply violated.
This gives rise to calls for even more Draconian
legislation. This
has certainly been the pattern with
campaign finance reform. Remember
how
when Al Gore participated in a fundraiser at a Buddhist temple,
clearly a case
of illegal campaign contributions, the response of the
Administration was not
to more scrupulously enforce the laws he violated, but rather to
demand that
even stricter laws be passed for politicians to violate with
impunity.
Finally
there is the great danger that the ultimate legislation will be
completely
publicly financed elections.
Not only
will the fox guard the henhouse, he will be given the only set
of keys to it. The
proposal will put the already too
powerful incumbents in complete charge of
"the mother's milk of politics." The people will have
been effectively and
completely silenced and all power in the hands of the state. Then American politics
will follow not Mummar
Qadhafy, but Saddam Hussein.