Your Sunday Politics: FEC-Sparked Hysteria
In the wake of a ruling by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the political blogosphere descended into hysteria this week, as the Federal Election Commission made intimations that they were poised to reconsider extending campaign finance reform laws to the Internet, which they had previously exempted from restrictions in 2002. During the past two years, savvy netizens took that freedom and ran with it. Because online partisans were allowed to coordinate with campaigns, popular political blogs became a clearinghouse of candidate banner advertisements, and many of the savviest turned their online ventures into successful engines of grass-roots financing, funneling thousands of dollars to candidates across the country.
Will the FEC put the kibosh on weblogging rabble-rousers? In an interview on C|Net, FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith (at right) fanned the paranoid flames by warning that it could happen. 
Smith stated that he and the other two Republican appointees on the commission wanted to appeal Kollar-Kotelly’s decision -- which is not altogether surprising, considering the fact that regulating the Internet and determining the valuations of Internet links are precisely the sorts of government intrusions conservatives tend to rail against. For his part, Smith is on the record as saying that he’d like "someone to say that unpaid activity over the Internet is not an expenditure or contribution," though he immediately offers a qualification: "... or at least activity done by regular Internet journals, to cover sites like C|Net, Slate and Salon."
Smith's remarks were met with a quick response. In a rebuttal on C|Net, FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub (at left) -- a Democratic appointee -- refuted the position taken by Smith, stating that calls for a "crackdown" on political blogging are "wildly exaggerated." Weintraub, who offers the same praise for online grassroots movements that Smith does, states very clearly: "First of all, we’re not the speech police."
Weintraub repeatedly expresses support for the protection of speech, it is noteworthy that she isn’t at all as adamant about the FEC not being the "Let’s Find Out How Much This Hyperlink Is Worth So We Can Start Fining People" Police. While she speaks of the Internet as a "force for good" in that it’s an inexpensive communications tool, it’s hard not to get all parse-crazy when she says, "It would be ironic indeed if, in the name of campaign finance reform, we were to try to squelch inexpensive online grassroots political rabble-rousing." As opposed to grassroots fundraising? A very curiously constructed phrase, wethinks.
Of course, the truth about what’s in store for political bloggers from the FEC is likely to fall somewhere in between these two points of view. Smith, though less evasive in his remarks, is constantly begging for someone -- anyone -- to remove the responsibility from the FEC in this matter. Weintraub, on the other hand, places more faith in the FEC’s process and takes careful pains to explain it. In the end, Weintraub simply wants to caution people against "those attempting to foment false hysteria in the internet community." Of course, if there wasn’t such a thing as the fomentation of false hysteria, it seems likely that the blogosphere would not exist in the first place.
[Subscribers to Roll Call can read more about this tete-a-tete over the future of blogs. This DCist, however, take exception to Weintraub's characterization of bloggers sitting by computers "wearing pajamas." Your DCist content is produced by a dedicated staff who wear our Sunday finest whenever blogging.]