Rant: The Fixers

There’s a lot of noise coming out of Washington these days about “campaign finance reform”, and although most of it is posturing to distract our attention from the fact that the Clinton campaign apparently committed some serious violations of current Federal law, some of these complaints seem to be sincere. Many politicians are doubtless genuinely concerned that they have to spend most of their time raising money for their election campaigns, time that might better be spent bribing and conning their home district into reelecting them.

But the trap in which they’re caught is one they made for themselves: the individual contribution limits, the PACs, and the “soft money” problems were all created by the 1974 campaign-reform act — itself, once again, principally a political gimmick to try to convince the public that the politicians were “doing something about the problem.”

The most reasonable thing to “do about the problem” is simply to repeal the 1974 law and disband the Federal Election Commission. Political rebels like Eugene McCarthy and John Anderson have both said that current laws severely handicap insurgencies like theirs, and it’s obvious that these regulations weigh much more heavily on challengers and third-party candidates than on incumbents with high name recognition and a record of pork brought home to the district. (Incumbent protection was part of the idea back then, as it is now. We’re all shocked — shocked! — to learn that, of course...)

Unregulated elections provided us with government leaders such as Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson — indeed, every elected official for the first 198 years after the Revolution. Are George Bush, Bill Clinton, Jesse Helms, Charles Schumer, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and Dianne Feinstein such a vast improvement?

But inside the Beltway, actually repealing anything is out of the question. What they propose is still more regulation, even while acknowledging that it will probably conflict with the Constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech. House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, for example, says, "What we have is two important values in direct conflict: freedom of speech and our desire for healthy campaigns in healthy democracy. You can't have both." So now Washington’s Fixers of Everything are proposing that the Federal government regulate political speech — that is, what you can say about the Federal government — in the name of “healthy democracy”! Do I hear George Orwell giggling uncontrollably?

Looking at the dismal history of this century, though, it seems about time that the last surviving fragment of the Bill of Rights should be obliterated. A quick review, in David Letterman order:

The Tenth and Ninth Amendments, restricting the powers of the Federal Government to those enumerated in the Constitution, died in the Civil War and were sealed in their coffin by the New Deal.
The Eighth Amendment (cruel and unusual punishment, excessive fines) is a victim of the War on Drugs. A twenty-year mandatory minimum sentence for possessing half a gram of cocaine? Confiscation of your $200,000 home if they find (or can plant) a joint somewhere in it?
The Seventh Amendment (civil suits) has been very sick ever since the legal establishment abandoned the common (meaning, essentially, common-sense) law for arbitrary legislated statute law, and is now so dead that recently Florida, for example, simply discarded all the normal rules of tort procedure in the interest of extorting more money from the cigarette manufacturers.
The Sixth Amendment (a speedy and public trial, facing your accusers) is simply ignored if the prosecution mentions either “national security” or — as usual — “undercover drug enforcement.”
The Fifth Amendment (criminal trials) has been effectively nullified by Federal prosecution after local acquittal, local prosecution after Federal guarantees of immunity, and packing of Grand Juries to rubber-stamp decisions by the DA. Its clause requiring due process for the taking of property is immediately overridden by any bureaucratic mention of a wetland or a kangaroo rat or a marijuana plant somewhere in the back 40 (or in the back seat, for that matter). And of course, it doesn’t apply at all in IRS courts.
The Fourth Amendment (searches and seizures) is yet another victim of the War on Drugs, with “no-knock” searches (translation: come in shooting), checkpoints, and housing sweeps becoming everyday tools of those in what we still call “law enforcement.”
The Third Amendment (quartering of soldiers in your home) seems to be surviving — but what if you don’t want to let some Federal official use your house as a surveillance post in, say, the War on Drugs or the War on the Militia?
The Second Amendment caught the flu in 1934 with the National Firearms Act, became bedridden with the Gun Control Act of 1968, and finally died with the Clinton “Crime” Bill. The only reason its funeral hasn’t been formally held is that a few recalcitrant citizens are threatening to start a fight at the wake.
So now we’re back to the First Amendment. It still guarantees freedom of religion (except to Native Americans who want sacramental peyote and to Seventh-day Adventists who collect guns, and not on school property) and freedom of speech (except for commercial speech, as long as you don’t try to broadcast it, if it has “redeeming social value” and doesn’t show pictures of a camel smoking, but not on a computer network, and you can’t encrypt what you say because it keeps the government from listening to make sure you’re free enough).

So there's not really that much left to lose. Maybe Gephardt is right; in the system of participatory fascism he calls "a healthy democracy", freedom of speech is — quoting Mr. Justice Scalia on religious practices involving drugs other than alcohol — "a luxury we as a society can no longer afford."

What’s really surprising is that they let that last little bit of freedom survive as long as they did. It must have been an oversight, or perhaps they were too busy thinking up new ways to confiscate citizens' property or to bribe the state governments into watching the citizenry for them. But don’t worry, our wise Federal Fixers in Washington will take care of this Pressing Social Crisis, just as they’ve handled all the other ones. Just wait and see...

The Fixers

Craig Goodrich August 1997

Craig Goodrich
August 1997