Congressional Democrats prepare another assault on free speech

A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows 6 in 10 Americans think the Democratic Congress "hasn't brought much change." Eager to change this impression, the Democrats are frantically trying to pass legislation before Memorial Day. First on the agenda is a bill restricting lobbying, which is heading for the House floor with lightning speed. The House Judiciary Committee is expected to pass it tomorrow, sending it to the full House for a final vote next Tuesday or Wednesday.

When a bill moves that quickly, you can bet an someone will try make some last-minute mischief. Hardly anyone objects to the legislation's requirement that former lawmakers wait two years instead of one before lobbying Congress. Ditto with bans on lobbying by congressional spouses and restrictions on sitting members of Congress negotiating contracts with private entities for future employment.

But the legislation may be amended on the floor to restrict grassroots groups that encourage citizens to contact members of Congress. The amendment, pushed by Rep. Marty Meehan of Massachusetts, would require groups that organize such grassroots campaigns to register as "lobbyists" and file detailed quarterly reports on their donors and activities. The law would apply to any group that took in at least $100,000 in any given quarter for "paid communications campaigns" aimed at mobilizing the public.

The same groups that backed the McCain-Feingold law, limiting political speech in advance of an election, are behind this latest effort to curb political speech. Common Cause and Democracy 21 say special-interest entities hide behind current law to conceal the identities of their donors, whom they would have to reveal if they were lobbying Congress directly. "These Astroturf campaigns are just direct lobbying by another name," says Rep. Meehan, who is resigning from the House this summer and views his bill as his last hurrah in Congress.

But the First Amendment specifically prohibits Congress from abridging "the right of the people . . . to petition the Government for redress of grievances." The Supreme Court twice ruled in the 1950s that grassroots communication isn't "lobbying activity," and is fully protected by the First Amendment. Among the groups that believe the Meehan proposal would trample on the First Amendment are the National Right to Life Committee and the American Civil Liberties Union. The idea goes too far even for Sen. John McCain, who voted to strip a similar provision from a Senate lobbying reform bill last January.

The possible outcomes are disturbing. For example, Oprah Winfrey operates a website dedicated to urging people to contact Congress to demand intervention in Darfur. If her Web master took in over $100,000 in revenue from Ms. Winfrey and similar clients in a single quarter, he might be forced to make disclosures under the law.

"It's huge," Jay Sekulow of the conservative American Center for Law and Justice, told The Hill newspaper. "It's the most significant restriction on grassroots activity in recent history. I'd put it up there with the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act"--the formal name for McCain-Feingold.

McCain-Feingold itself is riddled with loopholes, producing a slew of unintended consequences. Its provisions allowing candidates who compete against wealthy opponents who spend their own money to accept larger-than-normal legal contributions in order to compete inexplicably don't apply to the race for president. That means Mitt Romney and John Edwards, both of whom are independently wealthy, have a clear advantage should they run low on cash and need to inject funds into their campaigns quickly.

"Judged by the most visible results on promises like getting big money out of politics or cleaning up politics, campaign finance reform has been, to put it mildly, a disappointment," admits Mark Schmitt, a supporter of such reforms who has written a thoughtful essay in the journal Democracy. He urges reformers to now focus on expanding the "range of choices and voices in the system" and to take seriously the worries of those who fear that McCain-Feingold's restrictions on "election communication" have the potential to squelch important political speech. The Supreme Court is set to rule next month on a case addressing precisely that issue, and Justice Samuel Alito may be more inclined to view McCain-Feingold skeptically than was Sandra Day O'Connor, who was part of a 5-4 majority upholding the law.

Given the checkered history of campaign finance reform, its frequent use by one side of a political debate to hobble opponents, and the prospect that courts may yet find portions of McCain-Feingold unconstitutional, it would be a travesty for a Congress desperate for a quick-fix legislative accomplishment to circumscribe the First Amendment with little debate and even less understanding of what the consequences will be.

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British police madness government-driven

Police officers are being driven to make "ludicrous" arrests for trivial incidents to bolster government targets, the new Justice Secretary will be told. The leaders of 130,000 police officers have drawn up a dossier of "lunacy" on Britain's streets. They say that children are being arrested for throwing cream buns and bits of cucumber while adults are getting criminal records for offences that merit nothing more than a ticking-off. The pressure to get results is so bad, they say, that officers are criminalising and alienating their traditional supporters in Middle England and many are so disillusioned that they are considering quitting.

What police describe as a target-driven criminal justice culture will come under attack today as Lord Falconer of Thoroton, QC, who was appointed Secretary of State a week ago, faces a debate at the annual conference of the Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers in England and Wales. The conference in Blackpool will consider whether the drive to meet targets is destroying police officers' traditional discretion to deal with minor offences on the streets without fuss or bureaucracy. Officers say that ten years ago a minor incident involving someone without a criminal record would have led to "words of advice". Now, the federation says, performance targets mean that the people involved are becoming criminal statistics.

Jan Berry, the chairman of the federation, said: "We have police officers who are considering leaving the service over this because it is not the job they signed up to do. "These examples we have compiled are ludicrous, but when people are being pushed to show results they will use anything they can to demonstrate they are doing a good job." She added: "Just talking to people and giving them a few words of advice cannot be counted as easily as a ticket. But sometimes it is just as effective as taking someone to court."

A spokesman for the federation added: "We have got into the situation where everyone is so busy chasing targets and securing ticks in boxes we are on the verge of distancing ourselves from Middle England." He said: "The cases we have compiled show incidents where an officer has been under such pressure to deliver that it has resulted in an arrest or caution when even the officer themselves thinks it is ludicrous. Understandably, when the public hears about this they ask: `What the hell is going on?'." The spokesman added: "It is a government agenda that is going down this avenue. Officers are saying they are forced to make arrests or cautions because the Government believes they should be judged by what can be counted."

Chief constables have also complained about the increasing pressures to meet both national and local targets. Last autumn the Home Office issued 30 general targets that police must meet, as well as more specific figures. Earlier this year John Reid, the Home Secretary, who will be speaking at the conference on Wednesday, promised that he would cut some of the targets.

But last month officers in Greater Manchester were warned about issuing fixed-penalty notices to drunks for public order offences so that they would count towards their target of two detected offences a month. Home Office research last year found a nationwide increase in drunks being penalised for causing harassment, alarm or distress. Researchers concluded that the trend may have been driven by government target-setting. Notices issued for offences such as causing harassment, alarm or distress count as a "violent crime" and an "offence brought to justice" for the purposes of Home Office statistics. The alternative, lesser charge of being drunk and disorderly does not count towards police detection targets.

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Australian PM Howard shows the way on Zimbabwe

It's time somebody did, says Melanie Phillips:

JUST what was that ghostly and unfamiliar noise we heard over the weekend? Good heavens - it was the sound of a country's political leader actually exercising leadership. The Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, ordered his nation's cricket team to pull out of a scheduled tour of Zimbabwe in September and even threatened to suspend the players' passports if the sport's governing body did not abide by his decision. His reason was that the proposed tour would be an "enormous propaganda boost" to Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, a "grubby dictator" who was behaving "like the Gestapo towards his political opponents". Despite the fact that for more than two decades the population of Zimbabwe has been starved and brutalised by Mugabe's tyranny, this is the first time a government has actually stopped its sportsmen playing there.

At a stroke, Mr Howard has thus exposed the supine hypocrisy of the rest of the world's leaders who, faced with Zimbabwe's escalating agony, have done nothing except wring their hands. What a difference, for example, from the behaviour back in 2004 of the British Government, whose supposedly "ethical" foreign policy did not stretch to stopping the England cricket team touring Zimbabwe.

Britain's cravenness is particularly shameful given that Mugabe is President of Zimbabwe only because the British put him there. A government that was intended to liberate people from repressive minority white rule has instead enslaved them through corruption, violence and tyranny.

In recent months, hundreds of Zimbabwe's opposition members, supporters and activists have been arrested, abducted or tortured. Earlier this month, a group of lawyers was beaten up by police in Harare outside the Ministry of Justice, where they were trying to present a petition against the unlawful arrest and detention of two of their colleagues. In March, the Opposition Leader Morgan Tsvangirai was arrested and beaten. In the same month opposition activist Nelson Chamisa was brutally attacked on his way to attend an EU-African, Caribbean and Pacific meeting in Brussels - while three regime members were allowed to attend despite an EU ban against Zimbabwe's Government travelling to Europe.

Moreover, Tony Blair recently told senior Labour colleagues that Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF party should be permitted to attend an EU-Africa summit in Portugal next autumn, again in flagrant breach of the EU ban - on the grounds it was better to "confront" Mugabe than exclude him.

The rest of the world has been similarly spineless. Despite South Africa's enormous influence over Zimbabwe, its President Thabo Mbeki has refused to exert pressure on Mugabe to relinquish power. Elsewhere in the sporting world, according to Zimbabwe's own state-run newspaper, football's governing body FIFA has given South Africa permission to allow visiting teams to base themselves in Zimbabwe during the 2010 World Cup. And to cap it all, Zimbabwe has recently been chosen - grotesquely - to head a key United Nations committee on the environment, while it so foully desecrates its own.

In such a morally degraded world, John Howard's initiative is so rare as to be utterly startling. Yet it is very much in line with his general political approach, in which he stands up for what he thinks is right without fear of any hostile reaction and simply calls a spade a spade. This confident outspokenness derives from a quality that is very rare in Western leaders -- being entirely comfortable in his own cultural skin.

So much of our political class is paralysed by guilt for what it perceives to be the West's original sin of colonialism. Indeed, the reason Mr Blair gave for suggesting Zimbabwe should attend this autumn's summit was that Britain's colonial past made it hard for the UK to criticise Mugabe's regime. Mr Howard, in sharp contrast, is entirely free of such absurd and crippling cultural cringe. He believes in Australia and its Western values. He thinks these values are superior to any alternatives. And it is this total absence of equivocation in upholding the national interest which explains his robust defence of both Australian identity and Western civilisation against attack.

He is an unwavering ally of America in Iraq and Afghanistan - while others are withdrawing troops from Iraq, he has sent more. He has introduced tough anti-terrorism laws, and has no truck with attempts to use human rights laws to weaken Australia's national security. And he and his senior ministers have spoken out against Islamic extremism in Australia, stating there will be no acceptance of sharia law, turning down a proposal to build a mosque with Saudi Arabian money and declaring that anyone who does not want to live by Australian values should go elsewhere. With the US presidential elections coming up next year, there is a vacancy for the leadership of the Western world. What a pity John Howard can't apply.

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Australia: Far too much government secretiveness

IT is a perverse fact of modern life that as technology dissolves the barriers to instant and limitless communication, the response of governments in Australia has been to increase the limits on what information can be made public. This ranges from a clampdown on simple public service information, such as which restaurants have failed council health checks, to the more sinister pursuit and prosecution of genuine whistleblowers who speak out for community good. It is a sobering statistic that Australia ranks 35th on a global index of media freedom by Reporters Without Borders, behind Latvia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, South Korea and Ghana, among others. The clampdown on the media's ability to report, and the community's right to know, reflects both a cynical manipulation of freedom of information regimes by successive state and federal governments and a power grab by law enforcement agencies under the guise of the war on terror. The combined result has been a trend that, allowed to continue unchallenged, threatens to undermine the foundations on which Australian democracy is based.

Concern has been raised formally by Australia's major news publishers and broadcasters, including News Limited. In an address to the Australian Press Council last week, Fairfax Media chief executive David Kirk outlined the pernicious way in which the anti-terror laws operate against press freedom. Federal police have been given the right to require any person, including journalists, to produce documents, based on the suspicion that they might assist the investigation of a terrorist offence, without having to produce a warrant.

It is a criminal offence to report that such a request has been made, punishable by up to two years in prison. Just as it is a criminal offence, punishable by up to five years in prison, to report that a preventive detention order has been made in relation to a detainee or any information conveyed by the detained person. While there will always be competition between public disclosure and secrecy when it comes to issues of national security, the increasing trend towards lessening the role of the judiciary in making that decision, such as the need for a warrant to be issued, is to be deplored. It is equally clear that neither national security nor public interest is always the prime concern of governments when it comes to keeping secrets. While Attorney-General Philip Ruddock has made public concessions to press freedom, promising shield laws to protect journalists from having to reveal their sources, the commonwealth's approach is flawed.

As the case of former Customs officer Allan Kessing demonstrates, giving protection to journalists from having to reveal sources is of little use to whistleblowers, who remain at risk of being rooted out and prosecuted within the public service. Mr Kessing is facing up to two years in prison after being found guilty of making public a classified report that the prosecution argued formed the basis of a series of reports in The Australian which led to a $212 million upgrade of national airport security. The report detailed near anarchy at Sydney airport. Mr Kessing was a contributor to the report, which was apparently shelved for two years after going through the appropriate chain of command for action. The newspaper has never revealed if Mr Kessing was its source. Under NSW legislation, a whistleblower would be protected for acting in the public interest in making such a report public if his or her superiors had failed to act.

Meanwhile, two Herald Sun journalists, Michael Harvey and Gerard McManus, are awaiting sentence after pleading guilty to contempt of court for refusing to reveal a source. Harvey and McManus have refused to reveal who provided information that the Government had accepted only one-sixth of the recommendations of a wide-ranging review into veterans' entitlements and had planned to short-change veterans of $500 million. A man convicted by a Victorian County Court jury of leaking the information was given a suspended sentence but was later acquitted of the charge by the state's Court of Appeal.

There is no obvious reason why the Government could not have come clean in the first instance. The guiding principle for good governance should always be that material be made publicly available unless there is a pressing national interest reason for it to be kept private. Any decision to keep information secret or restrict publication should be subject to judicial overview. The public service must be just that, not a law unto itself.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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