Scott Spiegel

On Tuesday the Mississippi electorate will vote on a controversial amendment to the state constitution declaring that “the term ‘person’ [is] defined to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the equivalent thereof.”  The Mississippi Personhood Amendment, as it is known, is echoed by similar ballot measures in a half dozen other states.

Since it is illegal to murder a person in all states, and all states have laws dispensing jail time or even the death penalty for murder, the logical conclusion from these referenda is that they will instantly reclassify a broad swath of society as felons.  Have pro-life advocates prepared state corrections officials for the flood of recently pregnant women, abortion doctors, and “morning after” pill consumers they’ll be sending to the pen or the gas chamber?

Mississippi’s law, the most extreme state personhood referendum on the ballot this year, would ban all abortions, some forms of birth control, and all embryonic stem cell research.

Jessica Valenti notes that Proposition 26 would “prioritize the rights of fertilized eggs over the rights of the women carrying them.”  Passage of the law would lead to the absurdity of proclaiming fertilized but unused eggs in a Petri dish to be persons and outlawing in vitro fertilization.

Pro-life conservatives have been crowing about the recent spate of stealth victories their movement has won on the state level.  In The Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes explains that this progress has been possible largely because gay marriage has become the more visible social issue in recent years and has detracted attention from continuing behind-the-scenes efforts to restrict abortion.  Such advances are supported, Barnes argues, by technological breakthroughs in sonogram quality, which have made fetuses seem more developed and autonomous than imagined.

Never mind that the reason new abortion restrictions have passed in multiple states is that Republicans took control of 26 state legislatures in 2010 by campaigning against Congressional Democrats’ stimulus spending and health care plan, and that the GOP did not receive some special mandate to start outlawing abortion.  In the minds of the religious right, the momentum is on their side, and they are becoming increasingly bold in their attacks on abortion rights.  As Barnes approvingly notes, anti-abortion crusaders have become “almost wildly ambitious, and more relentless than ever.”

To give a taste of the recently radicalized movement’s fervor, a pro-personhood newsletter in Mississippi assures voters that, while extreme, Initiative #26 would not criminalize miscarriage.  Oh—well, that’s a relief, then.

Meanwhile, go back in time to January of 2010, when the left was enraged because the Supreme Court had ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations, not-for-profit organizations, and unions have the same rights as citizens to spend money to express their political views by endorsing candidates or parties in the final months and days leading up to elections.

Justice Antonin Scalia ripped into Justice John Paul Stevens’ flimsy dissent, noting, “It never shows why ‘the freedom of speech’ that was the right of Englishmen did not include the freedom to speak in association with other individuals, including association in the corporate form.”  Organizations from the Heritage Foundation to the American Civil Liberties Union supported the decision.

Democrats Charles Schumer and Chris Van Hollen subsequently sponsored the DISCLOSE Act to try to squelch the free speech Citizens United had unleashed, but the bill failed to pass in the Senate.

No, of course corporations aren’t literally persons, or at least single persons.  They are considered “legal persons” under the law, not “natural persons.”  But they are made up of persons, and persons run them and act on their behalf.  Persons own the resources they wield.  Persons control how they are configured and operated to provide products and services that keep the corporations—and their employees’ jobs—in existence.

Why are liberals upset that corporations can exert political influence, when the persons that make up corporations can exert political influence?  How is a 1,000-employee corporation that exerts political influence different from 1,000 employees doing the same?

How is a corporation’s power more offensive than a single billionaire such as George Soros virtually controlling the operations of one of the country’s two major political parties?

Because the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, which Citizens United overturned, contained an exception for media corporations, I suppose Democrats would have us believe that corporations aren’t persons, but newspapers are.

But back to Mississippi.  Despite the claims of the recently ascendant “personhood movement,” a fetus simply is not a person.  It is biologically attached to and dependent on its mother, who is a person.  A newborn baby is incapable of surviving for long on its own; a fetus is even less so.  Unlike a physically-separate baby disconnected from its mother and beginning to move about and explore the outside world, a fetus is passive and lacks agency—the ability to act on its environment to pursue life-sustaining goals.

The Citizens United decision was proper, because it correctly identified the link between an individual’s agency in influencing the political process and the agency of a collection of organized individuals influencing the political process.

The Mississippi referendum falsely attributes agency and personhood to a fetus.  It should be soundly rejected.

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• When is a Person a Person? If Mississippi gets their Way it would be at Conception (ferrellgummit.wordpress.com)
• Mississippi’s Choice: Personhood and the Rights of Zygotes (time.com)
• Saying No in Mississippi: No to Forced Personhood, No to Voter Restrictions (my.firedoglake.com)
• Mississippi Voters May Change Abortion Debate (usnews.com)
• Colorado’s Failed Life-At-Fertilization ‘Personhood’ Initiative Lives On In Mississippi (huffingtonpost.com)

Since the clever acronym for Democrats’ new election fund accountability scheme is DISCLOSE, perhaps they could disclose for the American people the true intention of the bill and the consequences it will have on free speech and political advocacy during election cycles.

The Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections Act was proposed in response to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision in January, which slapped down the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act’s prohibition of corporate sponsorship of electioneering communications 60 days before a general election or 30 days before a primary.

The Democracy, etc. Act—alternately referred to by insiders as DISCLOSE, H.R. 5175, McCain-Feingold Part II, ABRIDGE, SQUELCH, and SUFFOCATE—would ban certain parties, such as federal contractors with more than a specified dollar amount in contracts, from producing any political communications right before elections, and would impose burdensome “transparency” requirements on others.  For-profit and nonprofit corporations would be regulated under the law, but unions would be exempted from it—a fact that absolutely coincidentally happens to disadvantage Republicans and benefit Democrats.

The act would also require the top five corporate sponsors of any ad to declare themselves at the end of the ad—which means that in addition to hearing politicians recite, “My name is Joe Windbag, and I approve this message,” we’d have to hear, “My name is Joe Moneybags, and I’m CEO of Megalopolis Corporation, and I approve this message,” “My name is…” etc.  Given that most political ads are only 30 seconds long, commercials under DISCLOSE will inevitably start to resemble that Eminem song where he raps over and over, “My name is… My name is…”

New York Senator Charles Schumer and Maryland Representative Chris Van Hollen are the proud sponsors of this bill.

Upon its unveiling, Schumer trumpeted that the bill’s “deterrent effect should not be underestimated.”

Van Hollen, who just so happens to be the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, claims that the bill is necessary because it will prevent foreign entities from influencing U.S. elections via shadowy front groups.

This is a remarkable claim for a Democrat to make, given that: (1) Citizens United did not, as claimed by our Fabricator-in-Chief at his State of the Union Address, “open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections”—it did not even alter the existing ban on election-related contributions from foreign nationals or corporations; and (2) a good chunk of Obama’s presidential election fund was made up of overseas donors whom Obama, unlike John McCain and Hillary Clinton, never required to reveal their identities or associations for the public.

In the wake of pressure from the National Rifle Association, who wanted an exemption from the proposed regulations and threatened to campaign against midterm election candidates who voted for the act, Democrats arbitrarily refashioned the legislation to exclude groups that had at least one million members, had been around for 10 years, had membership in all 50 states, and received no more than 15% of their funding from corporations.  Only the NRA qualified under these guidelines.  (An aide leaked that earlier language, rejected as too obvious, would have offered a carve-out for any organization that had been around for at least 139 years, boasted national membership of at least 3.5 million, counted Ulysses S. Grant and Charlton Heston among its former presidents, and sported an eagle atop two crossed rifles as its logo.)

Due to bipartisan outrage over the narrowly tailored exception for the NRA, last week the bill’s sponsors lowered the membership threshold criterion to 500,000, which allowed groups such as the AARP and the Humane Society into the Mile High Club.

Realizing that there were still not enough votes for the act, on Thursday House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tabled the bill, though Van Hollen this week announced that House Democrats’ efforts to reverse Citizens United were not over.  The White House chimed in by giving the bill a fresh endorsement on Monday.

Yesterday, Van Hollen released hilarious poll results claiming that 87% of Republican voters and 90% of Democratic voters supported the bill.  The only thing Republican and Democratic voters agree on in such overwhelming numbers is that Republican and Democratic voters don’t agree on anything that strongly.

DISCLOSE went to the Rules committee today, and a vote may come as early as tomorrow.

Democrats are dying to shove this monstrosity through Congress well before the November elections, to prohibit right-leaning groups from facilitating the expected Democratic massacre.  Their maneuver recalls the proposal Senate Democrats floated to get rid of the filibuster earlier this year, when they thought they couldn’t pass their health care bill with it in place.  In a letter co-written with Harry Reid, Schumer admits that, “We commit to working tirelessly for Senate consideration of the House-passed bill so it can be signed by the President in time to take effect for the 2010 elections.”

The Supreme Court may well overturn this law, in keeping with the spirit of their Citizens United decision, but by that point the November midterm elections will be long gone.

What all of this proves is that, as usual, Democrats never think ahead to what might happen as a consequence of the crummy legislation they pass for short-term political gain, and whether it might come back to cause them long-term political grief—to say nothing of its constitutionality or its utility in preserving the nation’s ideals.  I don’t know, I think a filibuster might come in pretty handy after two waves of Republicans sweeping Congressional elections in 2010 and 2012—eh, House Minority Leader Pelosi?

In addition to being immoral calculators who would throw their grandmothers under the bus for political power, Democrats are shortsighted and lunk-headed when it comes to enacting their schemes.  If they get away with DISCLOSE, it will only be because of the moral cowardice and incompetence of Republicans in failing to oppose them.



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• Dems tweak campaign bill to garner support (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
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