Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) tore into liberals and Democrats in a controversial Friday speech about progressive efforts to expand campaign finance disclosure requirements. But the speech wasn’t meant to gain positive headlines for Republicans or to score political points against Democrats — it was meant to steel the GOP will against intense pressure to voluntarily reject help from conservative groups funded by anonymous donors.
“I know that as November draws near, some of those running for office will feel the need to choose their battles,” McConnell said at the end of a long address at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “There will be a very strong temptation, particularly among conservatives, to take this particular issue off the table, to make concessions. My advice is to resist the temptation. Because, as I’ve said, everything we’re fighting for is contingent on our ability to speak our minds.”
And so my plea to you is this: unite. Send a message to the next generation of leaders, whatever their stripe, that the First Amendment is something about which there can be no compromise. We may not win every fight, but we can at least guarantee we’ll always have a place in the debate. And in the end, I’m confident, the best ideas will always win out.
He’s right to be worried. In Massachusetts, Sen. Scott Brown (R) and Elizabeth Warren have quashed outside ads.
And on PBS’ Newshour Thursday evening, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) — once a campaign finance reform champion — admitted, “maybe in a round-about way, foreign money is coming into an American campaign, political campaigns. … [A]gain, we need a level playing field and we need to go back to the realization that Teddy Roosevelt had that we have to have a limit on the flow of money and that corporations are not people. That’s why we have different laws that govern corporations than govern individual citizens. And so to say that corporations are people, again, flies in the face of all the traditional Supreme Court decisions that we have made — that have been made in the past.”
McConnell is also right that the issue is politically dangerous for Republicans. After McConnell’s speech, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) — a top Democratic party strategist — sent the following statement to reporters: “Senator McConnell’s entire speech was an exercise in twisted logic and double-speak. He has gone from being the greatest champion of disclosure to being its foremost opponent. As Justice Brandeis said, sunlight is the greatest disinfectant. Senator McConnell is apparently now afraid of sunlight because the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent for his candidates and against the President, if disclosed, would create an enormous backlash.”
