[EL] Informational benefit outweighed by cost?

[Steve Hoersting]

Was VanderSloot intimidated?  I don't know.  Possibly not, see this excerpt.


Mr. VanderSloot acknowledges that "when I first learned that President
Obama's campaign had singled me out on his 'enemies list,' I knew it was
like taping a target on my back." But the more he's thought it through,
"the public beatings and false accusations that followed are no deterrent.
These tactics will not work in America." He's [that is, VanderSloot's] even
"contemplating a second donation."

But if he is not intimidated, he would be a rare breed.  The point I keep
raising is that we no longer are seeing only citizen-on-citizen retribution
a la *Doe v. Reed.*  Rather, we may be seeing government-on-citizen
retribution.  After all, the man who coined the phrase, "The deterrent
effect of campaign disclosure should not be underestimated" is a sitting
Senator, not a researcher at Media Matters.

This is interesting stuff to discuss on the list, and I continue to think
that if, as it appears, we have officials entering the intimidation fray it
marks a difference in kind (from the discussion in, say, *Doe v. Reed*).
No need to remind me that the intimidator in *McIntyre* was, technically, a
government official.  The malefactor in *McIntyre* was small potatoes.
Here is what I mean:

VanderSloot is CEO of company making dietary products.  I wonder
if businessmen less brave than he have calculated how much relief they will
be able to obtain from courts or Congress if their medical products are
disallowed by the IPAB soon-to-be-selected by the next administration,
whoever that administration may be.  The relief available in Court or
Congress is nil, not least because the discretion the agency has is vast
that nearly any decision is "defensible."

Given New Deal jurisprudence, the time for concerned businessmen to protect
their economic interests is in the political process now, not in courts
later.

What I want people to consider is that as we approach a state of affairs
where regulatory agencies increasingly are given powers so vast that they
effectively possess the *means* of retaliation, and where officials seeking
re-election are displaying the *motive* to retaliate against businessmen,
the informational interest permitting compelled disclosure of independent
and non-corrupting political speech is not the slam dunk it used to be --
not if the *Socialist Workers* exemption to compelled disclosure continues
to prove a hollow remedy.

Good weekend, Mark,

Steve


On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 4:29 PM, Mark Schmitt <schmitt.mark at gmail.com>wrote:

>  Wait, *Vandersloot* was intimidated?? You do realize that the guy has a
> long history of attacking and intimidating any and all critics, including
> Forbes, which first put up an article about "Four Romney donors he doesn't
> want you to know about," by a Republican operative, and then pulled the
> article after Vandersloot's legal threats. He placed a full page newspaper
> ad, signed in his own name, attacking a reporter as "a homosexual." He put
> anti-gay billboards all over the state of Idaho. He's a totally public
> figure, not, as Strassel pretends, just a quiet citizen who wanted to make
> a contribution.
>
> I don't think divorce records should be made public, and they're usually
> not (and there's also no indication in Strassel's article that the clerk
> actually complied with the request for the records). But certainly if
> corporations are going to be major players in electoral politics, that
> activity should be open to public scrutiny, and the only way for that
> information to be useful is if we can also know the corporation's
> regulatory interests and legal issues. For example, Don Blankenship didn't
> give $3 million to replace a W. Virginia Supreme Court justice just to
> express his political views. It would have been useful for voters to know
> about the expenditure, and also about the legal/regulatory issues that
> motivated Blankenship and Massey Coal.
>
>
>
> Mark Schmitt
> Senior Fellow, The Roosevelt Institute <http://www.newdeal20.org>
> 202/246-2350
> gchat or Skype: schmitt.mark
> @mschmitt9 <https://twitter.com/#%21/mschmitt9>
> On 5/11/2012 2:45 PM, Steve Hoersting wrote:
>
> Kim Strassel has another piece in today's *WSJ* intimating that
> the compelled disclosure of independent, non-corrupting speech poses too
> high a cost on speech rights for too little benefit in voter information --
> especially absent a meaningful exemption available not just to Vandersloot,
> for whom it is too late, but to other would-be funders noticing this
> treatment, and eager to seek an exemption as John Doe or Jane Doe.
>
> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304070304577396412560038208.html
>
> --
> Stephen M. Hoersting
>
>
>
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-- 
Stephen M. Hoersting
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