I did lunch last Friday with Our Friend Faisal. Among the various topics of discussion was the FEC request for input on whether or not and if so how to regulate the online speech of bloggers, and whether they should qualify for the so-called "journalists' exception" to speech regulation.
As I recall, a law was passed recently, some McCain-Feingold thingy, that places limits on political speech. I was thinking that we ought to get an online petition going to maybe amend the Constitution to forbid the government from restricting The Peoples' ability to voice our opinions.
First off, I think that it might be a little dangerous to have politicians passing laws that limit the ability of citizens to criticize politicians. We needn't have something so broad as to protect *all* speech - I don't need an amendment to protect my rights to say that fluffy pillows are better (which they are) or that Katie Holmes is Tom Cruise's beard (which she almost certainly is), because I doubt that the government would really work to restrict those kinds of opinion. But we should certainly craft something to keep the government from passing laws restricting our ability to criticize the government, because otherwise they'll jump at the chance.
Another consideration is that restricting the political speech of Americans leaves the U.S. political opinion field bare of domestic voices, but wide open to speech of foreigners (not that there's anything wrong with foreigners, at least not all of them) since the laws passed here will have no limiting effect on people in other countries. I believe that it will be better for us if there is a healthy market for political opinion within the country. Since we have the most to gain or lose from governance good or bad, we really ought to have the right to try to influence that government.
At bottom, there should be no "journalists exception" for bloggers to qualify for. And if we were to pass an amendment denying the government the ability to restrict everyone's political speech, we wouldn't need any exceptions.
I'm probably not the best person to try to put the right words together, so we should probably enlist the aid of one of the many law professors that seem attracted to the blog world like politicians to a trough to do the speechifying for us. But I was thinking of one of those archaic sounding "Congress shall make no law... blah, blah, blah; abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; blah, blah, blah" sort of deals.
UPDATE: See this post over at the Coyote blog.
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