Atreus21
Lifer
- Aug 21, 2007
- 12,007
- 572
- 126
This is relevant to this thread:
http://www.nationalreview.com/artic...s-scott-walker-gets-facts-wrong-john-doe-case
http://www.nationalreview.com/artic...s-scott-walker-gets-facts-wrong-john-doe-case
Last week, the Guardian, a British left-wing paper, released nearly 1,500 pages from the investigation into whether Walker “illegally” coordinated with third-party groups such as the Club for Growth during his 2012 recall election campaign. The Times asserts that these groups “are not allowed to work with a campaign to urge voters to vote for a candidate, because that would essentially allow donors to funnel money toward these groups to get around contribution limits that apply to campaign committees.”
Yet this assertion is flatly false. A Wisconsin state judge, two Milwaukee-based federal judges, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and the federal Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago have all ruled that relevant portions of Wisconsin state law are unconstitutional, which is why not a single person investigated in this aspect of the probe has ever been charged with anything.
The argument basically comes down to whether state laws apply to “issue” advocacy (ads that don’t expressly urge voting for or against a specific candidate) in the same way they apply to “express” advocacy (ads that explicitly direct the viewer to “vote for” or “vote against” a candidate).
Virtually every court that has considered the Doe probe has come to the same conclusion: The state ban on coordination between candidates and third-party groups applies only to express advocacy. Issue advocacy, on the other hand, is outside the framework of the state’s election law: The state cannot regulate “issue” television ads any more than it can regulate those insufferable “Peyton on Sunday Morning” spots. Thus, candidates are free to communicate in any way they want with groups that produce issue ads.
But these facts are too much for the Times editors, who focus their attention on the Guardian’s lengthy article of last week — which, incidentally, says that Walker signed a law inoculating paint manufacturers against nuisance lead-paint lawsuits only after a lead manufacturer donated $750,00 to the Club for Growth (a pro-Walker group) during Walker’s hotly contested recall election. Yet the Guardian article conveniently fails to mention that for nearly a decade, Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature had been pushing a bill to grant “retroactive immunity” to paint companies. Walker signed this bill as soon as Republicans took full control of state government, in 2011. Nor does the Guardian choose to mention that over that decade, left-wing third-party groups had received millions from trial lawyers intent on blocking the proposed bill.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/artic...s-scott-walker-gets-facts-wrong-john-doe-case