Richochet Op-Ed
by Mitch McConnell
Over the past couple of years, I and others have grown increasingly concerned by the Obama Administration’s repeated attempts to silence its critics through federal agencies like the IRS, the SEC and HHS, and even through an executive order aimed at denying contracts to its political opponents.
But when the President’s top political advisor let slip last week that, if reelected, the President may attempt to amend the First Amendment, I knew it was high time to speak up loudly and clearly against these tactics, and to call on all Americans to oppose them at all costs.
In a speech last Friday at the American Enterprise Institute, I said:
“One of the things that has always distinguished Americans as a people is the eagerness with which they’ve organized around issues and causes they believe in. As Alexis de Tocqueville put it more than a century and a half ago, ‘In no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used or applied to a greater multitude of objects than in America.’ Yet today, this principle faces a grave external threat. The danger comes from a political movement that’s uncomfortable with the idea of groups it doesn’t like speaking freely, and from an administration that has shown an alarming willingness itself to use the powers of government to silence these groups. This dangerous alliance threatens the character of America. And that’s why it is critically important for all conservatives — and indeed all Americans — to stand up and unite in defense of the freedom to organize around the causes we believe in, and against any effort that would constrain our ability to do so.”
Citing the 1958 case NAACP v. Alabama, as well as the FEC’s longstanding exemption of the Socialist Workers Party from existing disclosure requirements, I made the constitutional case against government-compelled select disclosure of donors.
Transparency always sounds good in theory, I argued, but government-compelled selective disclosure isn’t so much a tool of good government as it is a blunt political weapon, which is precisely what the proponents of the so-called DISCLOSE Act intend to use it as.
The goal is to identify and then vilify those who support right-leaning causes, thus either scaring them off the playing field or discouraging others from stepping onto it in the first place.