The proposed amendment was introduced by Sen. Tom Udall (D-CO) as S.J.R. 19 and if ratified would become the Twenty-Eighth Amendment. It provides in part that “Congress shall have power to regulate the raising and spending of money and in-kind equivalents with respect [to] the Federal elections … [and] State elections.”
The proposed amendment includes a provision that “Nothing in this article shall be construed to grant Congress the power to abridge the freedom of the press.” So Breitbart News, The New York Times, and the mainstream media would be able to say whatever they want, but citizens and citizen groups such as the National Rifle Association could not. …(Snip)
…the right of Americans to fully engage in political speech is guaranteed by the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. If S.J.R. 19 becomes part of the Constitution, it would be the first instance in which a right secured by a constitutional amendment was later scaled back.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) promises that the full Senate will vote on the measure later this year.
harry reid can go to hell.
That could certainly throw a wrench into the mechanism whereby Wealth buys Power, and then utilizes that Power to amass even more Wealth. I’ve got a spare monkey wrench, if it happens to be needed.
@enchanted:
It wouldn’t be his first trip there. He’s out on good behavior now.
@Greg:
Except that what you’re suggesting is a purely imaginary problem.
Should the Republicans ever gain back any kind of control, it will be amusing to watch Harry Reid and his collectivist hypocrites immediately flip-flop on this, just as he did on the fillibuster.
@Greg:
you say that as if it is the Republicans you’re referring too. I can name more billionaires on the Dimocrat side that it fits.
The US Constitution has zero chance of being amended for a political shenanigan.
@Kraken:
and that’s exactly why it’s going no where.
@Kraken, #4:
Really? You don’t believe that special interests having enormous sums of money can use it to manipulate public opinion, and to influence elected officials to promote law and policy that’s to their own advantage? You don’t believe that this is actually happening?
That strikes me as a bit naive.
If you don’t like the Koch brothers as an example, we could always cite George Soros.
@Greg:
Really.
You misunderstand me.
Special interests do indeed have enormous sums of money that they use in exercising their 1st Amendment rights. These special interests include organizations that pool donations from private individuals. The fact that they do this is not a problem. Except perhaps for fascists who want to prohibit others from exercising those rights, such as yourself.
Remember Greg, the left’s adolescent hyperventilationists often pant about things that aren’t actually issues. This is one of them. Income inequality would be another. Most of this comes from mindless anti-captitalist nonsense that drones have been directed to embrace and disseminate by their masters in the Collective.
The problem here is that unlike you, I’m not a hypocrite. As much as I loath George Soros’ repugnant efforts, I would not in any way desire to limit his speech for any reason.
Hey remember the old Voltaire quote that the Collective used to parrot when they weren’t in power:
Whatever happened to that?
@Kraken, #9:
It’s not about an individual’s right to speak their mind. It’s about money’s power to give some people the ability to speak so loudly that they can drown out other individuals’ voices. Some people never seem to recognize that distinction. If they do, they won’t acknowledge it.
@Greg:
That’s a silly statement. If someone paid a billion dollars to speak very loudly on tv and you didn’t want to hear him, would the amount he had paid prevent you from changing channels? What method can a very rich person use that is more effective than someone with very little or no money that would require that you have to listen to him? I can think of nothing. If some rapper, say Kanye West were giving a concert across the street from where I was standing and admission were free, I wouldn’t go. His power could not force me to listen to his crap. Suppose one of the Kochs and Soros were giving a speech at the same time, would you be ‘required’ to listen to both? or neither. Money can’t force your attendance? Can it?
@Redteam, #11:
No one is forced to watch a commercial, either. Nonetheless, bigger advertising budgets generally sell more of any particular product. If they didn’t, corporations would be pointlessly throwing away billions of dollars per year. (Over $100 billion per year on internet advertising alone.) I don’t think they’re doing that. I think spending more money on commercials for a given product predictably increases sales.
Politicians and political ideas are sold in exactly the same way. The amount of money that’s spent changes the outcome of elections. People aren’t pushing court cases to remove limits because they’re freedom of speech advocates. They’re doing it because they want to use money to alter the outcomes of elections.
@Greg:
Well, then I guess someone needs to tell Steny Hoyer and the rest of the Democrats to keep their money’s power in check so they don’t down out other individual’s voices. Hop to it.
@Greg:
Are you saying that’s why the Dims won the last 2 presidential elections? Are you saying people are required to watch tv commercials? Maybe they’re watching because they want to learn about the product.
I’m not aware of any proposed legislation specifying that campaign spending restrictions would apply to one party but not to the other.
@Greg:
I’ll point out the inherent hypocrisy of your words. But first, let me remind you of this.
Note that you “claim” concern about the power of money to give “some” the ability to “speak so loudly that they drown out others. Yet you overlook the fact that this is exactly what every MSM corporation and the majority of the members of the press source is doing every day and the majority of the media is admittedly comprised of Democrat aligned journalists and the majority of the traditional MSM is owned by big money media moguls who are mostly Democrats. The clear goal of this proposed Unconstitutional amendment is to shut-up the free speech of everyone except the mostly Democrat controlled MSM. You have spoken out before against Rodger Ailes and FOX news. Where is your angst against Ted Turner, Bill Gates, etc. over their using the news networks they own to voice their agenda and use propaganda to mold the way people think? That is Fascism Greg, little different from Hitler’s propaganda ministry, and you are a hypocrite.
@Ditto:
As has been repeatedly illustrated here, Greg is of course a hypocrite. If he and the rest of the Collective were truly concerned about the ability of some people to speak so loudly that they can drown out other individuals’ voices, then he’d be making the same complaints about the Collective’s activists and protesters. He doesn’t because that isn’t what this is about at all. Rather, this is about silencing the Collective’s political opposition under a NewSpeak redefinition of the 1st Amendment. Greg is a fascist. Plain and simple.
Drones in the Collective are easily swayed by propagandist material, which helps to explain the popularity of Lena Dunham and Sandra Fluke. Just check out some of the moronic flyers that the Occupy crowd disseminates as they poop on each other. So drones naturally assume, that all people are equally susceptible to the marketeering of dastardly capitalist sorcerers, who weave their spells on hapless victims in their commercials. The fact that better and wiser people constantly warn them not to buy the Shamwow, just never registers because they’ve been led to erroneously believe that subscription to a hallucinogenic-based ideology somehow magically gives them special wisdom to know better. It doesn’t.
The preposterous notion that spending gobs of money on messaging somehow drowns out other voices, might have been able to convince the more gullible back in the flatulent 1960s, when there were only 3 major networks, and a handful of major newspapers. But in 2014, where there are hundreds of cable channels, and access to the internet gives the individual the ability to be their own personal broadcasting station as we’ve repeatedly seen with blogs and YouTube videos that go viral globally, this argument just doesn’t have any merit.
@Greg: The legislation Reid is pushing would do just that. A very small number of corporations control the vast majority of the legacy media not to mention the entertainment industry. Is it a coincidence that General Electric owns NBC and pays zero taxes despite huge profits? I think not. How far can openly conservative entertainers get before leftist ownership of the media tries to rein them in? Is there any part of Reid’s law that would limit the financial power of big labor?
Seems like the NRA could get around this “amendment” easily enough. They publish magazines, books and such… they *are* the press.
I might consider -if there was a rational and practical way to do it- limiting political funding to money raised within the scope of the election.
HARRY REID TAKE JOBS AWAY, AND THE KOSH BROTHERS PROVIDE JOBS,
reid=0
kosh=100
@Greg: Greg- does that mean that Soros, Adelson, and the Koch brothers would be treated the same? Or, as is typical for leftie progressives, ” Do to you ,but not to me?”
@Kraken: The left doesn’t want to have opposing views out there that way they can re-write history and discard facts in order to brainwash their ilk. Just last week I had one know-it-all lefty state that the VA was part of the military in order to take the blame for the current scandal off of the Obama administration and place it on the military. Another stated that Reagan was the one who moved Social Security into the General Fund. Where do you suppose they get their “facts”?
From this.
Buying influence. From the party of the little guy.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/in-the-loop/wp/2014/05/19/dine-with-obama-and-65-of-his-closest-friends/
How is it any different to charge more tax from those who have more, Greg?
Shouldn’t we all be taxed the same under your principle?
When our money is taken away at different rates, why shouldn’t the taxed be allowed to speak more forcefully with whatever money is left over?
Most political ads are created by consortiums.
Groups that pool money from many sources like how George Soros gives the lion’s share to MoveOn.org and several other front organizations.
Should he be limited by what the poor widow can afford to give?
WHY?
Remember the beer/income tax analogy?
The 10 men buying $100 of beer on Friday night, sharing the cost based on wealth?
When the barkeeper lowered the price to $80 the new arrangement upset all the nine lower-income beer buyers.
So they turned on the richest guy and beat him up.
When he failed to show up the next Friday, they didn’t have the money for their own beers!
OOPS!
Same thing in political ad buying.
Libs are in the process of beating up THEIR OWN sugar daddies!
When will those sugar daddies walk away?
Or when will Libs understand they are simply the useful idiots of their sugar daddies?
@Nanny G: Nan, the idea of raising rates on the wealthy is not to actually take more money from them. The point of increasing the rates is to give more power to the rulemakers who can create loopholes in return for campaign contributions and contributions to ideological nonprofits who will hire friends and family of the rulemakers.
As always, the leftist politicians pretend to care about the poor in order to control the rich. Rich leftists know this well and know they will become immune.
@Kraken: Do you think that was filmed before or after their OWS rally?
Kraken
this is unbelievebel, what is that liquid they drank, they where transformed in beasts,
all of them, and it”s already too late for them,
IS THAT WHAT THE WELFARE CHECKS CAN BUY TO THE YOUNG PEOPLE?
@Kraken, #17:
You claim to understand how markets work. Have you somehow missed the fact that advertising opportunities with the largest audiences cost the most money? The reason messages can be transmitted inexpensively via many new information channels is because they won’t register with many viewers, listeners, or readers. It takes significantly higher amounts of money to place a message where it will be received by a significantly higher number of people. A Super Bowl ad will cost $4 million. Late night cable spots are dirt cheap because hardly anyone sees them. How much money you have to spend determines how many people will hear your message. Thus a cranky billionaire or a special interest flush with cash can shift public opinion or sway the outcome of an election.
Anyone can put pretty much whatever message they want on the internet for very little cost. That doesn’t mean anyone will see it. The average internet page is like a needle in a haystack.
Please provide the exact quote.
Not at all. What I have absolutely no chance of getting through to your pickled brain, is that there is absolutely no problem whatsoever with a cranky billionaire or a special interest flush with cash, paying large sums of money for advertising opportunities that play to the largest audiences. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with getting more people to hear your message because you have more money to spend.
I understand that unthinking leftists flap their arms and contract hives over any kind of capitalist activity. But remember, the problems that Marxists imagine with capitalism are just that; imaginary. The problems exist only inside of your altered brain, and absolutely no where else. Remember, the real problem here is your adolescent obsession with perfect equality, which of course can never exist.
I haven’t seen a Super Bowl ad in over 10 years. In fact, I haven’t been a regular watcher of television for longer than that. The fact of the matter is, the advertising you’re hyperventilating over is so ubiquitous that it has effectively become white noise. Your misunderstanding of the issue also suggests that you believe this sort of advertising to be the only method of getting a message out, because the examples you cite are based on the Jurassic 3 Network Model. Blogs and YouTube do these things routinely every day to very large audiences. Some of the tutorials I view, which by the way are not only cheaper but vastly superior to traditional school today, receive millions of views. That’s more viewers than MSNBC.
Putting a message on the internet doesn’t guarantee that anyone will see it, nor should it. As viral blog posts and videos illustrate, content is king. Come up with something good and compelling, and people will spread it.
Now, I understand that drones in the Collective are highly susceptible to propagandist material. It’s why they plagiarize and appropriate so much graphic art material from the old Soviet Union. But mature adults aren’t mindlessly controlled by advertising content. Adults can watch a commercial, and decide if they agree with it, or if they require more information to make a decision. If the George Soros pays $10 million dollars for a Super Bowl ad encouraging everyone to get a colostomy bag so that each person can have their own personal compost heap at their side, I doubt anyone outside of hipsters and the fruit flies who live inside their beards would entertain the thought. And honestly, who cares about them anyway?
So at the end of the day what we really need here is not a tyrannical restriction on free speech. Rather, what we do need instead, is to eliminate the rights of leftists to vote, so that they aren’t rushing to the voting booth based on every half-baked PAC ad that comes down the pike.
@Kraken, #30:
In that fashion, consolidated wealth and power could eventually prevail over our constitutional democratic processes, which would come to be little more than something done for the sake of appearances. It doesn’t take much imagination to grasp how that could happen. Maybe the problem is that you consider all of those with large sums of money better qualified to make the rules than the average citizen, and are content to let them compete exclusively among themselves to hold the reins of power. There does seem to be an undercurrent of that in republicanism. The rich are responsible, while the rest are rabble. Anyone can elevate himself, however, by becoming rich, and in that possibility resides all the fairness anyone should expect from life. A preoccupation with money seems to be at the heart of all things.
I grow weary of hearing about The Collective and its drones. It has, in fact, become a bit of a drone. Please see about getting some new material or some new medication. Or you could consider dropping the personal insults, so the focus could be kept on whatever subject is at hand.
Here’s another front on the War on Free Speech.
Campuses are now placing “trigger warnings” in textbooks when it contains material that is disturbing or offensive. (Read: right of center material)
Since we know that leftists are unable to control themselves when confronted with intellectual material they find offensive or with which they disagree, they have to be warned ahead so that they can get their emotions under control.
does anyone know about the breaking news from 2013, saying the COURT HAVE DECIDED
THAT OBAMA MUST BE IMPEACH,
AND IT READ VERY SERIOUSLY DONE,
how come it was to be done by the end of 2013, and not done yet,
@Greg:
In fact it takes a quantum leap with a dash of disjointed logic to dream up such a scenario, if you’re not imbibing mind altering substances. First it’s important to understand that the nation is a constitutional republic. The mob rule of democracy is not a part of America’s DNA, nor was it ever meant to be. Next, we need to consider what historical precedents indicate that this is a potential future. Now, there may be some obscure cases of corporate oppression somewhere in the world, but by and large tyranny and atrocity always comes from government, rarely from private enterprise. 6,000 years of recorded civilization backs this reality up. This is unsurprising when we consider the nature of the fascists currently occupying our offices. The entire concept of a corporate dystopian future is a fantasy concocted by the Collective. Let’s take a look at the film Blade Runner for instance. This film was set in 2019. So back in the early 1980s, they predicted that we’d be living in some dark corporate dystopia. It never happened. These kinds of predictions always come up empty because there’s really nothing factual to base them on. They’re all based on unchecked emotions mixed with collegiate Marxist indoctrination.
The fact that well to do people are more successful because they’re generally more competent, really isn’t a problem. Rather, the real problem here is your Marxist abhorrence of economic freedom and the free expression of ideas that run counter to your fascist ideals, which of course your hallucinatory journeys helped facilitate.
Honestly, go engage in some culture jamming with the other commie kids if you’re that upset about it.
*sniffle*
If you think you’re weary of hearing about the Collective after a few months, imagine how weary I was of hearing about it after suffering through 4 years of worthless college. Collective, collaborative, cooperative. Rinse, repeat. Unfortunately for you, your weariness indicates that I’m striking the correct nerve, which encourages me to continue. Please enjoy.
People who engage in self medication probably aren’t the sort one ought to trust for medical or psychological advice.
HILARY CONDITION IS NOT DONE NOT OFF LIMIT,
SARAH PALIN IS RIGHT, WHAT DID THE DEMOCRATS DONE TO HER, THEY ALMOST GOT HER, and her children KILLED, she did not have a concusion about it, she is a strong very smart woman,
AND SARAH IS A LOT IN BETTER HEALTH THAN HILARY,
AND SHE HAS THE ABILITY TO TAKE OVER ON THE SECONDS,
BUT HILARY HAS BEEN SLOWED DOWN BY HER CONCUSION,
TOO BAD FOR HER BUT SHE IS NOT
A PRESIDENTIAL ABLE MATERIAL,
WHAT SHE FAIL TO DO, PROVED IT, AND SHE CANNOT BLAME ANYONE,
@ilovebeeswarzone:
Bees, I’m afraid you’re going to have to find it yourself and get back with us on that one. You simply haven’t given us enough information to comprehend what “breaking news”court ruling it is you are referring to.
Ditto
HI,
I read that at a YOU TUBE, which I received with other things in it,
I still have it here, but the day after it was gone, there was a note that you cannot,
make a copy on it, it was made in late 2013, because it said that he will be gone by the end of 2013,
I was wondering how come the news did not touch it,
the person saying it look legit to me, and it came as a breaking news sign,
he talk for quite a long time, his speech told of why the decision has been given,
People for ”limiting how much each person can spend on ads,” make a false claim that ”the rich,” could eventually “prevail over our constitutional democratic processes,” (quoting Greg) .
But here is the reason that’s wrong: no matter how rich you are you only get ONE VOTE.
IF your ideas are so good they convince others to vote your way, so be it.
But if they are not, no amount of cash thrown into the political ad pot will lead to a win.
We’ve seen this with gun control advocacy.
Obama, his ilk, throw all sorts of cash down that hole but ”the people” want to retain their right to bear arms!
Nanny G
if I can add something that could make a good idea not pass, is the way this 2012 election was won,
the best ideas did not pass, because there was a rope around the necks of half the people, who should have never be given the right to vote,
BECAUSE OF MANY FACTORS, one is their total ignorance in their country,
the other among so many more , is that they where bought
WITH FOREIGN MONEY RAINING IN,
AND MORE OF,
AND I DIDN’T TALK ABOUT THE LIES FED ONTO THE PEOPLE,
@ilovebeeswarzone:
If it was a You Tube video I wouldn’t necessarily give it any validity. Like Wikipedia, you can put pretty much place anything you like up on You Tube. The trick for viewers is weeding out the truth from the fiction, as there are quite a few people who put total nonsense up on YouTube.
Ditto
yes i doubt it, BECAUSE it was to be applyed in the latest 2013,
that”s why i brought it up,
thank you for the advice ,the person who read the speech look so professional,
he was believeble by his stance and dignifyed public apearance,
like one say, HE COULD HAVE FOOL ME,
I USUALLY SAVE THOSE THINGS BUT THE WARNING OF FBI
TO ARREST ANYONE WHO COPY THAT ONE ,
STOP ME, AT THAT TIME,
I WENT BACK TO SAVE IT REGARDLESS, AND COULDN’T FIND IT
IT HAS VANISH,
I STILL LOOK FOR IT, I KEPT THE YOUTUBE ON MY SITE, AND GO BACK AT IT, THERE ARE NEW ONES BUT NOT THAT ONE,
THAT’S WHY I CAME OUT TO ASK,
BYE