Straight Talk Express Falls Into McCain-Feingold Hole

John McCain’s campaign Straight Talk Express is supposed to represent his politician’s honesty. Then, how come he’s opposed to ordinary citizens being able to express their political views about their politicians? Free speech is not a one-way street, from top down, that belongs to politicians. It is every American’s constitutional right.

McCain-Feingold is nothing less than an usurpation of American’s rights to free speech, and strikes at the essence of democracy: the citizens untrammeled right to be heard and felt, and to feel those powers are respected by politicians.

Bob Bauer, active Democrat, chair of his prominent law firm’s political law practice, widely published expert on campaign law, brilliantly exposes the core corruption of democracy that is McCain-Feingold in “Equality and the Experience of Speech Limits.”

Bauer describes “the incompleteness of the way ‘free speech’ is now understood.”

It is more than an individual "right"; it is a quality of democratic life that, such that any infringement of political speech, for only some citizens in some circumstances, is still a loss for all, experienced as a loss of equality….

Through parrhêsia ["frank" speech], subjects stand free and clear from any subordinated position in other hierarchies or rankings, including those of social position or of the inherited past. No custom is sacred, nor is any contemporary prejudice limiting. Each citizen, freed to speak, is more than free: she experiences directly, rather than enjoys merely juridically, full equality as a participant in the affairs of state. The speech may be ignorant, and it may, for reasons wholly unrelated to its merits, be ignored: but in proclaiming the violability of the free speech right, parrhêsia crucially defines the equality of the governed in the political sphere.

Once this position has been adjusted, something of moment has occurred. Reasons are—usually are—offered for the adjustment, persuasive to some and less so to others. But after the adjustment has been made, it may remain true that "It is a free country and I can say what I want," but it is not, in the respect in which the right has been altered, as true now as it was before, as subjectively experienced by the speaker….

The government may have allowed for alternatives—some groups might form a political committee, or run the same ads but without the reference to the candidates—but it is the fact that citizens must search out alternatives that constitutes the experienced offense….

Persons of "average means," we assume, only care so much, having little opportunity to run ads or any chance of bumping against any legal restrictions on doing so. Such persons are not untouched by the controversy, however, if any speech restriction would diminish their sense of control over the government or the government’s respect for that control. They might actually care that someone, somewhere—a union or a small nonprofit corporation or a multinational behemoth—cannot simply buy time to question an officeholder by name, before an election. For them it bears, with some immediacy, on notions of equality, different in kind from the notions of equality in whose name these restrictions were legislated, allegedly for their benefit.
In other words, some of what is said about these restrictions—some of the exaggeration now being protested—are not unimportant simply for being imprecise. We might take these statements seriously, because how citizens view the government’s treatment of speech—the perceived relationship of the rulers to the ruled—is heavy with consequence for the credibility of representative institutions. Any problem that develops here is not waved away by questioning motives or by replying with learned constitutional and legal expositions. It is only made that much worse.