Pelosi Targets Grassroots Freedom of Speech

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=18510

"House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) has pledged to take up a lobbying reform proposal that would impose new regulations on speech by grassroots organizations, while providing a loophole in the rules for large corporations and labor unions.

The legislation would make changes to the legal definition of “grassroots lobbying” and require any organization that encourages 500 or more members of the general public to contact their elected representatives to file a report with detailed information about their organization to the government on a quarterly basis.

The report would include identifying the organization’s expenditures, the issues focused on and the members of Congress and other federal officials who are the subject of the advocacy efforts. A separate report would be required for each policy issue the group is active on.
"
A coalition of grassroots organizers, including David Keene of the American Conservative Union, Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America and Terrence Scanlon of the Capitol Research Center, have written an open letter calling on Public Citizen to renounce its efforts, which they called “flawed to the point of hypocrisy.”

“This bill would apply to those who have no Washington-based lobbyists, who provide no money or gifts to members of Congress, and who merely seek to speak, associate and petition the government,” it said. “Regulating the speech, publishing, association and petitioning rights of citizens is not targeted at corruption in Washington, as Public Citizen and its supporters would believe. Instead, it is targeted directly at the 1st-Amendment rights of citizens and their voluntary associations.”"

END>>>>>>>

Now I have posted before on how democrats were the ones actively belittling our civil rights, but this is an attack on all of us if we allow it. The first to be hobbled will be the conservative organisations. Who's next? I guess it's whoever is in power .


Freedom?

I found essentially the same article on Forbes.com.
This is a bit disturbing. I have said before that I would like to see something done about the lies told by some grassroots organizations on both sides. I also said I didn't see a way to do it without stepping on the first ammendment, so we are probably stuck with what we got. This legislation looks exactly like what I was afraid of.


Public Citizen, the group that is cited as writing the legislation for Pelosi has nothing about it on their website, at least not that I could easily find. I did discover that they consider themselves a watchdog group protecting the Citizens. They were founded by Ralph Nader, and seem to be a far left organization. They follow the same misguided principles Nader does. They want to make us all safe by having the government control everything.

I don't see them as an anti-grassroots organization though. I'm sure if they are supporting such legislation, they are doing so with the best of intentions, however misguided.