The intent behind the DISCLOSE Act is to stifle speech, but its unintended consequence has been to reveal that its supporters operate in a political universe where the concept of irony has not yet been discovered.

We’ve already pointed out that Senators Chuck Schumer, Russ Feingold, and Patrick Leahy have a website in which they allow people to show their support for the DISCLOSE Act while remaining anonymous. Our friends at the Center for Competitive Politics have discovered more such irony. Click here to read all about it.

According to this report in The Hill today, it is looking less likely that Senators Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Susan Collins (R-ME) will support the DISCLOSE Act. But, as the wisdom of Yogi Berra teaches us, the fight to defeat this speech-squelching legislation isn’t over until it’s over.

According to this recent report from The Hill, after Senator Scott Brown’s (R-MA) decision to oppose the DISCLOSE Act, the bill’s fate now rests in the hands of the following senators: Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Susan Collins (R-ME), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Ben Nelson (D-NE):

Democrats had hoped Brown would provide key support to move forward with the Disclose Act, which has been criticized by many Republicans and free-market groups as infringing on free speech. With Democrats in control of only 59 Senate seats, they need at least one Republican to reach the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster and move forward with the bill.

With their hopes for a Brown yes vote now dashed, Democrats and watchdog groups are training their lobbying fire on GOP Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, two Maine centrists who along with Brown have played decisive roles in a bevy of controversial summer bills.

The pair have been vocal supporters of past campaign-finance bills but have been tight-lipped about how they plan to vote on the Disclose Act, although Snowe denounced the Supreme Court decision after it was first issued.

Their offices did not respond to requests for comment from The Hill.

Democrats also could lose the support of two centrist Democrats, Sens. Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) — who is locked in a tight reelection contest — making Republican support even more crucial to overcoming an expected GOP filibuster.

Furthermore, the Daily Caller quotes Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) as saying on Tuesday that she won’t vote for the DISCLOSE Act as long as long as it has exemptions for the NRA and other groups. Last month, Senator Frank Lautenburg (D-NJ) said that he would not vote for the Act if it contained the NRA carve-out.

As we’ve noted on various occasions, the DISCLOSE Act is a blatant attempt to stifle speech in order to protect incumbents’ reelection prospects. Whether it lives or dies is up to the above-mentioned Senators. If they still need help making up their minds, we suggest that they dust off their copies of the Constitution and read a certain amendment that talks about how they’re supposed to “make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.”

In response to intense lobbying by a number of campaign “reform” groups, Senator Scott Brown has said that he will oppose the DISCLOSE Act because it “advances the political agenda of the majority party and special interests in an effort to gain a tactical and political advantage little more than 100 days before an election.” Brown contrasts DISCLOSE with McCain-Feingold, which he claims was “an honest attempt to reform campaign finance laws.”

One can take issue with Brown’s view of McCain-Feingold—indeed, during debates over the law, members of Congress expressed more disdain for the negative ads it banned than for the corruption it was supposed to prevent—but I’m willing to cut Brown some slack because he at least understands that DISCLOSE is all about partisan politics. In fact, I’d go a lot farther than that. The DISCLOSE Act shows that the desire to censor speech is alive and well among America’s political elites.

Of course, campaign reform groups are not giving up easily. As Roll Call reports, they’ve vowed to continue pressuring Brown “through a combination of personal lobbying and messaging efforts aimed at Massachusetts.” (For some reason, reformers never have a problem with efforts like these when they are carried out by people who support their agenda. But I digress.) Ironically, they’ve even threatened to “make the case over the coming weeks that his opposition is tantamount to supporting the kind of ‘Swift Boat’ ads that helped sink the 2004 presidential campaign of Brown’s home-state colleague, Sen. John Kerry (D).”

Wait, doesn’t that count as “Swift Boating” itself? This is all so confusing. What isn’t confusing is the contempt supporters of DISCLOSE have for the First Amendment and for anyone who dares disagree with their political agendas.

Yesterday the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued an important ruling (.pdf) for First Amendment rights, striking down Connecticut’s unconstitutional “matching funds” law in the case of Green Party of Connecticut v. Garfield.  The court specifically rejected the Ninth Circuit’s decision in McComish v. Bennett that refused to strike down Arizona’s largely identical matching funds scheme.  The Institute for Justice, which has been challenging Arizona’s law in McComish, wrote a friend-of-the-court brief (.pdf) in the Second Circuit in support of the victorious Green Party.

As we’ve described previously on this blog, matching funds discourage privately funded candidates and outside groups from speaking because, if those groups spend more than a certain amount on political speech, the government starts cutting checks directly to their government-financed opponents.  The Second Circuit’s ruling deepens a split among the federal courts of appeals on whether matching funds are constitutional, making it all the more likely that the U.S. Supreme Court will grant IJ’s forthcoming appeal in the McComish case.

If the Supreme Court takes on the issue—as it should—matching funds will likely be held unconstitutional.  And that’s not just our opinion—as the Associated Press reports, even so-called “reformers” are starting to look for alternatives:

“The handwriting was on the wall with the trigger provisions” when the Supreme Court made its ruling [temporarily halting Arizona’s matching funds], said Karen Hobert Flynn, vice president for state operations at Common Cause and a Connecticut resident. “They signaled that they don't like trigger provisions and they're on their way out.”

Nick Nyhart, president and CEO of Public Campaign, a Washington, D.C.-based public financing advocacy group, said there are other ways to help publicly financed candidates who face wealthy opponents.

We will continue to keep our readers updated as we move towards appealing McComish to the Supreme Court.

The Los Angeles Times reports on spending by independent groups in three California elections, raising alarm that “insurance companies, lawyers and other interests were calling most of the shots in the three campaigns.”  These concerns were echoed by Dan Schnur, chairman of the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC), who reacted to this independent speech by claiming that it “makes a mockery of the rules designed to create a level playing field.”

These sorts of overwrought claims are distressingly common in reporting on campaign finance, and this isn’t the first time the FPPC has been critical of the role of independent speech in elections (see, for example, their 2008 report on the phenomenon, the cover of which features the California capital building being menaced by a giant gorilla hurling $100 bills).  But these claims also fundamentally misunderstand the role that independent speech plays in elections.

Contrary to the view of many proponents of campaign finance regulation, voters are not automatons—interest groups cannot simply pour opinions into their heads.  Voters must be persuaded, and the groups profiled in the Los Angeles Times article are simply attempting, through independent political advocacy, to persuade voters to take action at the ballot box.  Those efforts may succeed or fail and, as the FPPC’s 2008 report shows, such efforts often do fail.  But as the Supreme Court recognized in Citizens United v. FEC (.pdf), “[t]he fact that a corporation, or any other speaker, is willing to spend money to try to persuade voters presupposes that the people have the ultimate influence over elected officials.”  In other words, it’s the voters who call the shots.

The plaintiffs in Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, et al. v. Swanson, et al., 10-cv-2938, which we discussed here last week, have filed a motion for a preliminary injunction.  The motion is scheduled to be heard before the district court on August 20, 2010, although the plaintiffs have asked for expedited consideration.

The motion argues, among other things, that after Citizens United “The only constitutionally cognizable interest in limiting contributions is the interest in preventing quid-pro-quo corruption.”  This interest, under the seminal case Buckley v. Valeo (1976), is only implicated with “large” contributions, so contributions with a per-donor cap, such as the $2,300 cap in the last federal election cycle, satisfy that interest, even when a corporation is giving the money to a party or candidate.  Thus, according to the motion, corporations should be able to give money directly to parties and candidates, something currently illegal under Minnesota, and federal, law.

We’ll keep a close eye on this case for our readers.

Click here to go to his new column on these topics. He begins:

Two splendid recent developments have highlighted how campaign finance "reforms" have become the disease they pretend to cure. In Arizona and in Congress, measures ostensibly aimed at eliminating corruption or the "appearance" thereof illustrate the corruption inherent in incumbents writing laws that regulate political competition by rationing political speech.

That’s exactly right: The idea that incumbents write “campaign finance” laws with no eye toward protecting their reelection prospects is—as we have previously noted—absurd.  

For more of our recent commentary on the DISCLOSE Act, click here, here, and here.

IJ is challenging the matching funds provision of Arizona’s “Clean Elections” system. For some of our recent commentary on that system, click here and here.