Senate Democrats Seek to Criminalize First Amendment–Protected Speech

[mystery-ak]

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/437765/print

 Senate Democrats Seek to Criminalize First Amendment–Protected Speech
By The Editors — July 12, 2016

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D., John Kerry’s yacht) is leading a marathon of denunciations in the Senate targeting a bunch of groups and institutions that don’t really have anything to do with one another: tobacco companies, chemical producers, think tanks, charitable trusts, oil companies, and, of course, Charles and David Koch. Nine-tenths of that is window-dressing. The targets are the oil companies and their money, and the Koch brothers and their activism.

Senator Whitehouse and the others are lambasting certain oil companies, especially Exxon, and the various activist groups associated (however distantly) with the Koch brothers for having “funded think tanks,” for having “paid public-relations firms,” and having “developed and executed a massive campaign” to spread their own views about global warming and policy questions related to energy and climate change. And they are demanding that their targets “cooperate with active or future investigations” into their spread of “climate denial.” In other words, Senate Democrats are once again using the Capitol as a political forum in which to denounce and threaten private citizens and organizations who dare to speak in the public square.

The relevant context here is that a group of Democratic attorneys general, supported by a network of other Democratic elected officials, donors, and activists, is attempting to criminalize the political activism that Senator Whitehouse is here denouncing. Exxon is the target of an open-ended investigation by the Democratic attorney general of New York, while think tanks and activist groups have been subpoenaed and investigated by the Democratic attorneys general of the U.S. Virgin Islands and California.

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[EasyAce]

There is plenty of room for disagreement on energy policy, climate change, carbon taxes, renewable fuels, and the like. There isn’t any room for disagreement about whether disagreement should be criminalized. If Exxon can be hauled into court for having unpopular opinions about climate change, and if the governor of Texas can be indicted as a felon for an unpopular political action, where do you imagine that leaves an ordinary citizen? This is a deplorable campaign against the very basis of democratic discourse, and Americans should not fail to be clear-eyed and clear-headed about exactly what is going on — and where it will lead.

You'd think they'd have gotten the hints when McCain-Feingold passed, was (idiotically)
signed by then-President Bush (who knew damn well how unconstitutional it was, having
said so often enough and publicly enough, but reneged on his original vowe to veto it),
and was then methodically dismantled by the Supreme Court.

Such ignorance is precisely how we fell into today's political dilemnas. But there are those
among us ordinary citizens even in these arterials who would think nothing of criminalising
mere disagreement.