"Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant"

The usefulness of whistle blowers shouldn't be overlooked by bloggers, of all people, nor should they, in this particular instance, have gone unremarked by the MSM for an entire year. In this case, those famous words of Justice Brandeis quoted above appear in the Autumn 2003 UCLA Law School magazine:

They were spoken by none other than Sean Treglia, the whistle blower and former program officer with Pew who last year revealed that Pew was behind efforts to manufacture a grassroots campaign in favor of campaign finance reform.

What would the UCLA Law Magazine have in it that Treglia, whose undergraduate and law degrees were earned at UCLA, might comment on? Nothing less than a grant from Pew for a cool $1.1 million "to study campaign disclosure systems in the fifty states."

So at least we know where a bit of that money went, and how it was used, in Pew's successful and heretofore little noticed drive to legislate limits on political speech by people John McCain and Co. don't care for.

What we don't know enough about -- yet -- is who formulated the policy that Treglia, who after all is small fry in this story, helped implement. If Treglia was playing the loyal officer obeying orders, who were the generals issuing them, and what were their intentions? Did his bosses at Pew intend to keep the policies he helped put into place as quiet as possible, and did they reason (correctly, it turned out) that the press would wink at this story if it got wind of it, given that it was all for a "good cause"? Mr. Treglia says that, after a column by George Will appeared that threatened to reveal the company line, the folks at Pew panicked for a couple of weeks. But nothing happened.

This might have been a perfect con job, but Treglia's bosses at Pew don't seem to have counted on one thing: the presence of a conscience in their former employee. I've joined others in being hard on Treglia, and I don't take any of it back. Carrying out a policy you find morally questionable isn't mandated by law. You could quit, after all. As a sharp young lawyer, Treglia wasn't likely to go on the dole had he walked from Pew.

Be that as it may, his revelation of Pew's intent is surely just the beginning of this story. For if Pew was willing to aid in the creation of what John Fund calls an "astroturf" movement, what else has it done that other Sean Treglia's might know but which, here-to-date, they have kept to themselves? Beyond Pew, have any of the other big liberal foundations -- Ford, MacArthur, Carnegie, and others -- engaged in similar actions? What has been funded under cover and passed off as "grassroots" in order to win a degree of legitimacy smart liberal activists know would be impossible to attain through more overt actions?

And what, exactly, is going on here? That may be the simplest part of the story: franchise restrictions. Pew has attempted to restrain the ability of the great mass of citizens to change their government through the exercise of the franchise. To be sure, there are no poll taxes, no race restrictions, and no gender biases, as there once were. But reigning in the amount that citizens may spend, both through direct giving to candidates or parties, and now by threatening political speech on the Net, empowers the political class while weakening the rest of us.

In other words, elites are attempting to accomplish, first through the courts and now through astroturf movements, what they cannot achieve at the polls. Their motto is: vote our way, or we'll seize power by other means. We'll fund favored candidates -- John McCain, Russ Feingold, et al. -- indirectly, the better to advance our agenda through friendly legislators. And, thus far at least, they've done it. Let's hope the Pew story marks the beginning of an era that will disinfect the subterranean faux populist industry that gave us McCain-Feingold.