Smokers who cherish free speech - beware!

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 7, 1997 | by Wendy West

The Scottish scientists who cloned a sheep may be behind the curve: A massive ovine cloning has been going on here in America. We graze in our marvelous consumer pasture never noticing, or if noticing not caring about, the wolves that are thickly among our flock.

Ruminate on a couple of recent developments -- the proposed amendment to the First Amendment, and the White House and the Food and Drug Administration on tobacco.

With full orchestration by President Clinton, the FDA has launched a campaign to keep teenagers from smoking. All right, smoking is unhealthy In addition to bans on certain advertising and promotions, one of the new regs requires purchasers younger than 27 to produce photo identity.

Younger than 27! What kind of brown-shirt nonsense is this? Where's the ACLU? Where are outraged citizens concerned that this identity policy has a totalitarian edge? Where are the intellectuals to point out that this backdoor government surveillance resembles the block committees beloved by tyrannies to make sure all are behaving as their masters decree?

The photo-proof of identity for tobacco well beyond the legal age of 18 (by what nitwit process was age 27 chosen?) is quintessentially liberal: Any means are justified so long as the end is judged admirable. That reasoning profoundly is corrupting to civil liberties -- liberties of which Americans were once flammably protective.

But euthanizing the First Amendment is worse, and there's hardly been a squeak of protest due to sleepy news coverage. (Odd, since the media quickly howl at any "chilling" specter, such as a jury verdict against ABC's devious report on Food Lion supermarkets in collusion with a union trying to organize the chain.) In fact, a lot of Americans are not widely aware of the crusade by the Hon. Richard Gephardt of Missouri, the House minority leader.

Gephardt says he's all torn up over financing of elections and plans for reform. This is a sexy issue now as more disclosures come about the slippery, and perhaps illegal, fund-raising by Democratic nabobs. Clinton has admitted, in a slick use of the passive voice intended to deflect accountability, that "mistakes were made." (Yes, Republicans have sinned in this area, too.)

Thus, Gephardt, in progressive ecstasy, has unfurled a constitutional amendment to regulate future elections. There's too much paid political advocacy being communicated to suit the gentleman, so the feds will decide how much is allowable -- which is to say, who may say what and how.

Listen to Gephardt: "What we have is two important values in conflict: freedom of speech and our desire for healthy campaigns in a healthy democracy. You can't have both."

That's pure bleep. So is his cure for the supposed collision: Slam-dunk the First Amendment. Columnist George Will, one of the few among the pundittiere who has incinerated the Gephardt Gambit, contends that "freedom of speech is today under more serious attack than at any time in at least the last 199 years -- since enactment of the Alien and Sedition Acts."

Gephardt is a wily old pro and knew there'd be quicksand ahead. But he has enough gall from years on Capitol Hill to reckon he can spin the dim-bulb citizenry by insisting on how awful elections have become. For those who were absent from civics class that day, the First Amendment prohibits Congress from making any law "abridging the freedom of speech."

Gephardt says he knows "this is a serious step to amend the First Amendment." But he marches on, claiming "this is not an effort to diminish free speech." His amendment, he says, merely would give the feds the power to "define" those political expenditures "deemed to be for the purpose of influencing elections." That is ionospheric absurdity, of course. All political contributions are intended to influence elections.

There is a sane way to "regulate" political money. Let anyone donate as much as he or she wishes to a candidate or party -- on the sole and imperative proviso that the candidate or party make immediate and full disclosure. It's that simple. Provision of free television time for candidates, on which some progress is being made, is an obvious and sensible way to restrain one of the chief expenses of running for office -- and to reduce the vast sums needed in a campaign.

The tobacco inquisition and Gephardt's subversion evidently are being accepted by the populace because -- well, tobacco's nasty campaign contributions (from "fat cats," as the big media phrase it) supposedly are insidious. Therefore, let's do something, even if what we do is destructive of America's rare traditions of civil liberty. Never mind the Founders. Forget the Bill of Rights.

A little more of this sort of reform and we should consider a new national motto: "Baaaa."