-------- Original Message --------
Fri, 6 May 2011 15:13:52 -0700 From: Joel Gora
<joel.gora@brooklaw.edu><joel.gora@brooklaw.edu> >
[snip] But, having been there from the beginning of the
ongoing battles between associational privacy rights and campaign finance
disclosure, I did want to address one historical point Steve made,[snip]
It strikes me as accurate to frame one side of this debate as that
favoring "associational privacy rights".
Because legal changes are needed in order to legalize certain types of
secret political financing (in the name of associational privacy
rights), at bottom what is being asserted is not simply the
legalization of associational privacy, but its affirmative
Constitutional protection. That's a leap from the illegal all the way
to the sacred, using the First Amendment as the primary vehicle.
Conspiracy is defined as follows: "An agreement between two or more
persons to engage jointly in an unlawful or criminal act, or an act
that is innocent in itself but becomes unlawful when done by the
combination of actors."
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/conspiracy
"Associational privacy" when it is illegal is an important part of the
essence of conspiracy in the legal sense. When "associational
privacy" is constitutionalized and campaign finance laws struck down,
it legalizes conspiracies, and also enshrines them in the halo of
Constitutional protected activity.
Whether one agrees or not with the substantive result in a given case,
it seems rather obvious that conspiracies of political agreement
(reframed as "associations") are being legalized - because
conspiracies are agreements by two or more people to accomplish an
illegal result. It is striking that these conspiracies or
associations can also take the further step of being enshrined in
positive Constitutional doctrine.
--Paul R Lehto, J.D.
P.O. Box 1
Ishpeming, MI 49849
lehto.paul@gmail.com
906-204-4026 (cell)
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