Today, the FEC will meet and discuss rules regarding blogs. I’m not optimistic they grasp what they are really doing. Two letters from congressmen to the commissioners don’t provide any more sense of optimism. Platitudes.
I’m not as optimistic as the folks at Democracy Project. I don’t trust the Feds at all when they begin trying to modify existing laws with rulemaking rather than eliminating a bad law and rewriting it correctly. When have they ever done that?
At the bottom of the post at DP is a link to the proposed rule in Word format. Like any good Federal bureaucracy, the FEC proposes to make employers the high sheriffs of their rules. Just as the IRS forces employers to collect taxes for them, the FEC wants to restrict the way blogs are run such that “corporate” computers are watched for blog activity.
These folks, along with politicians, still don’t grasp the concept. They seem to view a blog in the same way as they see political leaflets–paper being copied and distributed by hand. For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth just before the last election about outsourcing, they don’t understand that I could change this blog to bunkermulligan.au and use a hosting service in Australia like some friends do. The boundaries just don’t apply in the same way. My blog is anywhere I want it to be, from any computer with an internet connection.
What Congress needs to do, and what I’ve encouraged my representatives to do, is repeal BCRA and start fresh. But Congress never does the smart thing. No law, once on the books, is ever repealed. That might make some senator who wrote it feel all bad about himself. Instead, they look to amend existing laws, no matter how flawed they are.
This is all bad policy. And we all need to make sure they understand it is also very bad politics. Nothing in this regard will improve until they feel eyes on them watching how they handle this. Politicians are already feeling insulated from repercussions becaused they’ve passed off responsibility to the FEC. We need to be sure they understand we haven’t absolved them from it.