McConnell Speaks On The Continuing Assault on the First Amendment And The Culture of Intimidation

Today In Washington, D.C. - June 21, 2013
The House was not in session. Yesterday, the House Farm bill (H.R. 1947) was defeated 195-234. Yesterday, the ARRA News Service commented on the defeated bill: "The Food Stamp program in the Farm bill accounted for an abominable $750 Billion or almost 80% of the total. The Food Stamp program needs to be separated from the agricultural portion of the bill. Farm programs with some minor adjustments may indeed need a portion of the $189 Billion which should have been the true cost of a Farm Bill. And, the American taxpayers deserve major reform in the Food Stamp program which is also bloated by Government overheads and administrative costs.

Warning, the Senate passed Farm Bill is still lurking around Congress. House leadership will now try to twist some arms to gather more votes for passage of the House Farm bill. If they succeed, then the bill will go to conference with the Democrat-controlled Senate. Chris Chocola, President of the Club for Growth calls this 'a recipe for a backroom deal that will only lead to bigger government."

The Senate was in session today. They considered of S. 744, the immigration reform bill. Negotiations over amendments to the bill continue.

Yesterday, Senate Democrats tabled (rejected, meaning a ‘no’ was a vote for the amendment) the amendment so S. 744 offered by Sen. John Cornyn by a vote of 54-43. The Cornyn amendment would have required that a number of security standards, including a secure border and apprehension of 90% of illegal border crossings, be met before permanent legal status could be granted.

In a significant speech today at the American Enterprise Institute, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell discussed the use of government power to stifle speech and the Left’s attempts to intimidate speech they don’t like. Leader McConnell spoke a year ago AEI and highlighted the growing threat to free speech, particularly the targeting of conservative groups by the IRS, calling on Americans to unite in vigilant defense of the Constitution. While some on the Left dismissed his remarks then, the current growing IRS controversy has shown the need for vigilance.

In his speech today, Leader McConnell said, “Last June, I stood here and warned of a grave and growing threat to the First Amendment. That threat has not let up. Our ability to freely engage in civic life and to organize in defense of our beliefs is still under coordinated assault from groups on the Left that don’t like the idea of anyone criticizing their aims, and from a White House that appears determined to shut up anybody who challenges it. On the outside, there’s a well-documented effort by a number of Left-wing groups like Media Matters to harass and intimidate conservatives with the goal of scaring them off the political playing field and off the airwaves. . . . Then, of course, there’s the widespread effort to stifle speech from within the government itself, something the Obama Administration has been engaged in from its earliest days. . . . [M]y central point last June, and my central point today, is this: the attacks on speech that we’ve seen over the past several years were never limited to a few Left-wing pressure groups or the DISCLOSE Act, which I’ll turn to in a minute. They extend throughout the federal government, to places like the FEC, the FCC, HHS, the SEC, and as all Americans now know — even to the IRS. These assaults have often been aided and abetted by the administration’s allies in Congress. And they’re as virulent as ever.”

He explained, “The IRS scandal has reminded people of the temptations to abuse that big government, and its political patrons, are prone to. People are waking up to a pattern. They’re connecting the dots. And they’re rightly troubled. Looking back, the IRS scandal helps explain a lot of the things this administration has done. You all remember the President wagging his finger at the Supreme Court during his 2010 State of the Union address. Well, I assure you this little piece of presidential theater wasn’t done for the ratings. There was a good reason the President and his allies devoted so much time and energy to denouncing the Citizens United case. But it’s not the reason they gave. . . . The real reason the Left was so concerned about Citizens United was that they thought it meant more conservatives would start to form what are known as social welfare organizations — something they’d been doing, with groups like Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club, for years. And what’s notable about social welfare groups is they don’t have to disclose their donors. That was the main concern of the President and his allies. They weren’t interested in the integrity of the process. If they were, they’d have been just as upset at Left-wing groups for maintaining the privacy of their donors. What they really wanted was a hook that enabled them to stir up outrage about conservative groups, so they could get their hands on the names of the folks who supported them — and then go after them. Citizens United provided that hook. As a longtime political observer and First Amendment hawk, I knew exactly what the Democrats were up to with their complaints about this decision.”

He elaborating on the underlying issue of the IRS scandal, “What matters here was the atmosphere; what matters is the culture of intimidation this President and his allies created around any person or group that spoke up for conservatism — or against the direction the President and his administration wanted to take us. . . . For the Left, this isn’t about good government or corporate governance, it’s about winning at all costs – even if that means shredding the First Amendment. And that’s why we need to be vigilant about every one of these assaults. They may seem small and isolated in the particular, but together they reflect a culture of intimidation that extends throughout the government — a culture abetted by a bureaucracy that stands to benefit from it. The moment a gang of U.S. Senators started writing letters last year demanding the IRS step in and force more disclosure upon conservative groups, we all should have cried foul. The moment the White House proposed a draft order requiring applicants for government contracts to disclose their political affiliations, we all should have called them out. When the HHS Secretary told insurance companies they couldn’t tell their customers how Obamacare would impact them, we all should have pulled the alarm. And as soon as we realized that Left-wing groups were manufacturing a public outcry for corporate disclosure at the SEC, we should have exposed it for what it was. There might be some folks out there waiting for a hand-signed memo from President Obama to Lois Lerner to turn up. What I’m saying is that a coordinated campaign to use the levers of government to target conservatives and stifle speech has been in full swing and open view for years. It’s been carried out by the same people who say there’s nothing more to the DISCLOSE Act than transparency, and no more to other disclosure regulations than good government. But the IRS scandal puts the lie to all this posturing.”

McConnell concluded, “So my plea to you today is that you call out these attacks on the First Amendment whenever you see them, regardless of the target. Because the right to free speech doesn’t exist to protect what’s popular. It exists to protect what’s unpopular. And the moment we forget that is the moment we’re all at risk. If liberals can’t compete on a level playing field, they should think up better arguments. But until they do, we need to be vigilant, and fight every assault on the First Amendment with everything we’ve got.”

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