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Thanks for embracing the Internet & starting a blog :)

The Vermont Libertarian Party, one of the parties involved with the case, now has a press release available, which also includes audio commentary from our state chair, Hardy Machia, about the decision. For more info, click the link above.
 

There also was a great My Turn in yesterday's Free Press:


Court sides with freedom of speech

June 28, 2006
There has been a lot of teeth-gnashing over the spending in politics, but let's hold on here.

Vermont's campaign finance law that the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Monday was a classic case of good intentions coming in direct conflict with the cornerstone of the Constitution: the First Amendment.

In any competition with the First Amendment, the victor must be this protector of our rights. The First Amendment must be upheld.

The U.S. Supreme Court did that Monday when it struck down parts of Vermont's 1997 campaign finance law -- a law that sought to put limits on campaign spending in state races but also put limits on freedom of speech.

The Vermont law sought to cap spending for the gubernatorial race at $300,000 and $2,000 for state representatives while contributions to state campaigns would be limited to as low as $200 per election for representatives of the House. The goal was to set the nation's strictest spending limits in an effort to keep deep-pocketed contributors out and the political process clean. This is a worthy goal.

But as Justice Stephen Breyer noted in his decision, although the Vermont law's objectives were legitimate, the law was so restrictive that it could become an obstacle "to the very electoral fairness it seeks to promote."

Perhaps most interesting in this exercise was that Breyer noticed an absence of graft and corruption that the Vermont law would try to rectify.

As the justice pointed out, there was no context for the law. He wrote that Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell, who argued in favor of the law, had not shown "any dramatic increase in corruption or its appearances in Vermont."

It's a good point. You create laws not necessarily to anticipate a problem but to deal with a problem. If there had been a serious problem with campaign spending involving graft in Vermont, then the attorney general would have had a busy time prosecuting. He hasn't.

The worst problem we've had with graft accusations lately has been a sheriff in Windham County who was accused of using public money to buy a banjo, among other things.

This law doesn't fit in Vermont. It doesn't fit in any state, for when we corral the right of speech -- and sometimes it costs money to talk -- we cut away at our most basic freedom.

The First Amendment has to take precedence.