DISCLOSE Is a SHAM
By Bradley A. Smith
It’s an election year, and incumbents are nervous. And so, in a classic sign of political weakness, Senate Democrats have scheduled a vote on legislation that would manipulate campaign-finance laws to silence their opponents.
Their weapon is the “DISCLOSE Act,” a gimmicky acronym for “Democracy Is Served by Casting Light on Spending in Elections.” Democrats in Congress have been trying to pass various versions of the bill since the winter of 2010, when Republican Scott Brown’s stunning victory in the special election to succeed the late Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts revealed the unpopularity of Obamacare and the Democratic agenda.
Despite claims that the bill would merely inform the public about campaign spending, DISCLOSE originally would have prohibited large amounts of speech, and not just about candidates. Senate Democrats failed to break a Republican filibuster on this first version by one vote in 2010, and their majority has shrunk since then. But they haven’t given up, and while they haven’t passed a budget in over three years, they have scheduled a cloture vote (i.e., the vote needed to break a filibuster) on a new version of DISCLOSE for Monday.
