What an unholy mess in Washington, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has acted disgracefully. Ryan Sager reports on how champions of a large gas tax in Washington State have sought to silence the tax's opponents:
In April, Washington's Legislature passed a 9.5-cent-a-gallon gas-tax hike -- which would give the state the nation's highest gasoline tax. Public outcry was followed by the formation of a grass-roots group, No New Gas Tax, intent on overturning the new levy via an initiative -- Initiative 912.
Two talk-radio hosts, Kirby Wilbur and John Carlson of Seattle's KVI-AM (a Fox News affiliate), embraced the signature-gathering drive to put I-912 on the ballot. And that's when the trouble started.
The radio hosts were a bit too effective at getting the word out about the anti-gas tax initiative, so a county prosecutor with ties to the initiative's opponents decided to try to shut them up by making clever use of the state's campaign-finance-regulation machinery. San Juan County Prosecutor Randall Gaylord sued No New Gas Tax, alleging that the group had failed to list KVI-AM's commentaries as contributions to its campaign.
Advocacy on Wilbur and Carlson's shows, Gaylord argued, was really just an "in kind" contribution -- no different than a check written to a political committee. And, amazingly enough, a judge agreed with him. Thurston County Superior Court Judge Chris Wickham argued in his opinion that he was merely requiring "disclosure" of the contribution. But when it comes to campaign-finance regulation, disclosure is virtually always a precursor to restrictions.
This is infringement of First Amendment rights, pure and simple, and shows why the President acted cowardly in signing the McCain-Feingold Free Speech Restriction Act in his first term. Truly sad, then, that the Seattle P-I came down on the side of the idiot judge and the shifty prosecutor.
Read the whole article.
No comments:
Post a Comment