…especially for assholes who think they’re better than everyone else.
SEATTLE – A Socialist political candidate is stirring controversy in Seattle over her desires to keep her campaign donor lists off the record.
Linda Averill (search), Freedom Socialist Party candidate for the Seattle City Council, said she wants the government to impose hefty taxes on large corporations, but she doesn’t want the feds, or anyone else for that matter, to meddle in her campaign donor lists.
Ah. We want to be in charge but we don’t want to play by the rules everybody else plays by. How charmingly soviet.
“We want to replace corporate rule and the rule of the rich with the rule of the working people,” Averill said.
So in other words, you’re preaching the (possibly-)violent overthrow of the system that serves us pretty well.
As far as Averill is concerned, the working people rule by keeping their anonymity while they contribute to her campaign.
I thought she said that the working people didn’t rule yet.
Like Socialist candidates before her, Averill is seeking an exemption from donor disclosure laws, claiming that identifying her supporters could expose them to harassment.
Aww.
“It’s not a position of secrecy, it is fighting for the right of privacy and freely associating without fear of retaliation,” Averill told Fox News.
Oh, you mean like being a conservative in a blue state?
But critics claim that Averill is benefiting from biased exemption laws that favor organizations on the political left.
“It’s outrageous that the major parties have to disclose their donors but these smaller parties don’t have to,” said Steven Moore, president of the Club for Growth (search), which supports limited government and lower taxes.
Donor disclosure laws are intended to prevent big-money interests from unduly influencing an election. Political candidates that raise more than $5,000 in a campaign must file a report with the Federal Elections Commission detailing their income and expenditures. The disclosure is a matter of public record.
And it should be. If you’re going to claim the right to rule over me, I want to know who your supporters are. It might totally change my attitude about you if I were to find out, say, that your principal backers are the Chicoms and the ELF.
But in 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a 1979 FEC ruling that exempted the Socialist Workers Party from the disclosure laws, saying that the party’s ideas were so unpopular that its supporters could reasonably expect a backlash. The ruling was found to be constitutional because it protects unpopular party supporters’ rights of free speech and free association.
Which is a decision just shouting out for reversal. If your ideas can’t stand the light of public criticism, then by definition they’re probably pretty lousy ideas, ne? If you want to govern, you need to come clean with the people you want to govern. That’s what democracy is all about, not that a socialist would understand that.
On a 4-2 vote, the Federal Elections Commission renewed in April the Socialist Workers Party exemption from the donor disclosure law, saying Socialist party members would be subject to harassment if they were exposed like major-party donors.
See preceding fiskagraph.
The Socialist Workers Party (search) advocates a Marxist proletariat revolution to overthrow the government and wants to replace the country’s free market system with a government of workers and farmers, similar to plans by Cuban and Russian revolutionaries.
FEC spokesman Ian Stirton said that the Socialist Workers Party is the only group to claim the exemption, but exemption advisories are not issued on partisan lines.
“I’m sure that the advisory opinion was based on the circumstances of the case, but I don’t think it would have anything to do with political bias,” Stirton said.
<sarcasm>Oh, no. Not at all.</sarcasm>
Almost all exemptions go to candidates on the extreme political left, like Averill. Fox News was unable to find a single instance of exemptions going to candidates on the fringe right, no matter how distasteful the platform. Whatever the reason for the apparent double standard, critics said that election laws must be equally applied.
“There’s a lot of hypocrisy going on because the Socialist Workers Party is one of the groups that actually has supported all these campaign finance laws,” Moore said. “So they want disclosure for all these other parties but don’t want disclosure for themselves.”
Yep. What’s sauce for the goose remains (surprisingly enough) sauce for the gander. If you want to run for government, be prepared for the fact that some people (or in this particular case, most of the people) will find you to be politically unattractive and deserving of scorn.