Disclose Bill Loses Again….and Will Likely Be Up For Another Vote….Again.
on July 17th, 2012 at 7:40 am
The DISCLOSE Act lost again in the Senate yesterday. This is good news. But of course there is bad news too…
Bad News Part 1: The fact that DISCLOSE is even being discussed speaks volumes to the depths the Democrats have fallen. What is DISCLOSE? Well it is, according to the Democrats, a bill to reign in those “shadow” groups that fund political advertising. This passed the Democrat controlled House in 2010, (Goodlatte voted against it). In the wake of the Citizens United Ruling, they are looking to reign in the influence of corporations giving large sums to election campaigns.
Of course doing so without hurting their own election campaigns. From Michelle Malkin’s site…
“At a Rose Garden press conference on Monday, President Obama decried the influence of “shadow groups” on elections and urged the Senate to pass the “reform” sponsored by N.Y. Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer. But the loophole-ridden package exempts large nonprofits with 500,000 or more members. Behemoth labor unions get preferential treatment. Bradley Smith, former Federal Elections Commission chairman, noted that the law places radical speech-squelching restrictions on companies’ ability to run independent political ads: “(I)f you’re a company with a government contract of over $10 million (like more than half of the top 50 U.S. companies) or if you’re a company with more than 20 percent foreign shareholders, you can’t even mention a candidate in an ad for up to a full year before the election. … There are no similar prohibitions for unions representing government contractors or unions with foreign membership.”
The NRA actually threw themselves in favor of this bill because of the 500,000 member loophole. With friends like that… 
Even the ever squishy Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell can’t get behind this…
GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell put it more starkly during Tuesday’s debate before the Senate cloture vote on the bill: The DISCLOSE Act, he said, is a “transparent attempt to rig the fall elections.” At bottom, McConnell diagnosed correctly, this is a jobs-protection bill for entrenched incumbents more interested in protecting their hides than protecting the Constitution. While the cloture vote fell three votes short of the needed 60 on Tuesday, Schumer vowed to resurrect the issue “again and again and again until we pass it.”
Bad News # 2: The Democrats, as corrupt and morally bankrupt as they are, have one huge advantage over our side. They never give up, they never stop fighting for issues, they don’t give a hoot about public opinion, public pressure or offending the other side. While they fight for evil immoral things, they fight for them with the zeal that Republicans only wish they had.
Bad News #3: After a couple a good vote on the Coal Legislation, Virginia’s Wobbly W Twins from the Senate, Warner and Webb, fell back in line with their friends in Washington and voter for DISCLOSE again. And Kaine will be right along with this if he is elected, and likely not have the courage to occasionally stray out of line with his political masters. Kaine always listens to his masters voice like the good political lap dog that he is.
There isn’t much we can do to today on DISCLOSE. I am fairly confident Allen would vote with the rest of the GOP on this, so I suppose getting him to Washington would be helpful in cases like this. Heck, if Mitch McConnell can muster the guts to oppose this, I suppose George can too.
But if there is any lesson to learn from this it is simple. The Democrats are at war to fundamentally transform the nation. And the Republicans are on the defensive or out of the fight.
And that is a sure recipe for losing a war.
Chip Tarbutton
