[EL] Careful What [We] Wish For?

Fri Apr 10 20:37:32 PDT 2015

As if the local drug kingpin and his tools would follow the campaign finance rules and disclose…given that they break all the other laws.

Mark Braden once told me of a story about a corrupt sheriff in Ohio, and everyone was afraid of him.  No one would donate to his opponent, because then they would be targets of his wrath.

Disclosure can protect the corrupt and help keep them in office by giving the corrupt a list of people to intimidate or worse.  This is a fairly common tactic by evil politicians, as well as the corrupt.

My guess is that even without disclosure rules, people or the media would have figured out the Chevron spending.  In any event, if people really hated Chevron there, they would have voted for candidates who promised to hold the company accountable, which appears to have happened and probably would have happened even if they didn’t know who was spending on IEs.  The voters would likely gravitate to the anti-Chevron candidates.

David
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From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Salvador Peralta
Sent: Friday, April 10, 2015 4:17 PM
To: Steve Hoersting; law-election at uci.edu
Subject: Re: [EL] Careful What [We] Wish For?

Steve says that "what matters most" is focusing on the argument, rather than the donors.

But is that really true?

Imagine a scenario in which a local drug kingpin spends millions electing friendly judges, DA's and sheriffs, without limit or disclosure.

Is it really the case that having the opportunity to refute whatever public arguments that are made -- "My guy is tough on crime, their guy is soft on crime" -- are more important than public awareness that all of these ads are being paid for by a drug dealer?

Is there really no public interest served for local residents to know that the local drug kingpin is the driving force behind certain candidates?  It seems to me that's essentially the proposition that some folks are arguing for on this list.

Let's turn the question on its head:  What public interest is served in retaining the drug kingpin's anonymity?

Why should the drug dealer's desire to remain anonymous trump the public's interest in not seeing the hand-picked candidates of a drug dealer get seated?

Or take the example that I posted yesterday, where Chevron spent millions to win local races, outspending their opponents 20-1 in an attempt to ensure that they faced a friendly city council two years after a massive refinery explosion.

Is it more important for citizens to "weigh Chevron's public arguments free of bias about their source", or is it more important for citizens to know that Chevron is trying to buy the board in order to enact policies that the citizens of Richmond appear to broadly oppose?

Based on the election results, I think it's safe to say that the citizens of Richmond would overwhelmingly agree that what mattered to them was not seating a Chevron-friendly mayor and council, not debating the anonymous talking points of Chevron's PR firm.

Best regards,

Sal

________________________________
From: Steve Hoersting <hoersting at gmail.com<mailto:hoersting at gmail.com>>
To: "law-election at uci.edu<mailto:law-election at uci.edu>" <law-election at uci.edu<mailto:law-election at uci.edu>>
Sent: Friday, April 10, 2015 11:23 AM
Subject: [EL] Careful What [We] Wish For?

The listserv has been debating whether America has a system of meaningful disclosure. And wouldn't you know it, the early presidential running provides an illustrative example.

Hundreds, on both the Right and Left, have worked for years to free-up independent political speech and to secure a measure of anonymity for its donors. Of those hundreds, the ones on the Right can fairly be categorized as "Constitutional Conservatives."

So it is more than a little ironic that some *faceless* group has deployed unlimited and undisclosed dollars to rework Lyndon Johnson's "Daisy"<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDTBnsqxZ3k> ad (that decimated the 1964 presidential aspirations of Barry Goldwater) to now blast<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeVjM8VNSXk> constitutional conservative Senator Rand Paul. (Constitutional conservative Ted Cruz, the betting goes, will be diluted in the primaries by Mike Huckabee).

Perhaps we constitutional-conservatives should be careful what we wish for.

But without unlimited independent speech I don't believe there'd be a Senator Rand Paul. Without a Senator Rand Paul, there'd be no Presidential Candidate Rand Paul, and certainly no noticeable mentions of "neocons" in prime-time national television, which you cannot have missed if you've watching the last few evenings.

Neoconservatism -- these days "Reform Conservatism" -- is more a domestic policy than a foreign policy; it gets to the question of who we should be, as a People.

It, along with its antipode, New Left nihilism, are the two thorns that must work-their-way-out of the body politic for Americans to reclaim the Enlightenment liberalism we'd each hoped to raise our children in -- something writers on the Right<http://www.nationalreview.com/article/416307/war-private-mind-kevin-d-williamson> and Left<http://www.amazon.com/Silencing-Left-Killing-Free-Speech-ebook/dp/B00VSGEN2G/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1428685435&sr=1-1&keywords=kirsten+powers> are saying more and more frequently.

The trouble with a Warren - Rubio presidential race (the preferred candidates, respectively, of the Progressives and Reform Conservatives, so don't dismiss them) is that any battle between their sponsoring camps can only result in a diminution of popular sovereignty; not in a renewed "Power to People," nor in a revitalized Republican Grassroots. Perhaps this is because Immanuel Kant's attack on the mind only furthers Plato's Politics of Faith<http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-theological-politics-of-irving-kristol>. Perhaps as the New-Left thesis collides with the Reform-Conservative antithesis ... to leave, in its wake, an authoritarian synthesis<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/20/opinion/david-brooks-the-nationalist-solution.html?_r=0>.

There's no getting around it: Reclaiming the Enlightenment can only happen with free speech.

But that still leaves an objection to the efforts of constitutional conservatives, on disclosure grounds: No one really knows who financed the new ad designed to take-out Rand Paul. And shouldn't that tick-us-off?

This gets to the point, a point others have made better than I. Anonymity for independent speech, rather than detailed disclosure, allows us to know the argument without knowing the donors. And that makes us focus on what matters most: refuting the argument, not on seeking retribution. In politics, it is the argument that must be confronted. And the sooner we get back to that, the better.

But the truth is this. We know the forces behind this attack on Rand Paul. We know even better, I dare say, than its financiers do; even better than the ad-makers themselves. We've known "who" for months. We've known "who"<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato> for 2,300 years.

Steve

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