Last night, the House of Representatives on a 219-206 vote passed the DISCLOSE Act, their latest assault on free speech rights of everyone but unions.  It’s their push-back against the long overdue ruling in Citizens United, a ruling which overturned some of the most egregious provisions of the McCain-Feingold “Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act” (BCRA).

The politics of passing the measure were, like most of what the Democrats do lately, at least as interesting as the content:  In order to avoid opposition by the National Rifle Association (NRA), the Democrats created a carve-out from the free speech restrictions for a group which more than a million members which has existed for more than a decade and which gets less than 15% of its funding from corporations.  Wouldn’t you know it…the NRA is the only organization which fits the description.  The Dems ended up adding a few more exceptions which covered left-leaning groups like AARP and Sierra Club.

As an NRA member, I can say with certainty that I will not renew my membership when it expires and I encourage all other NRA members to do the same, and to contact the NRA and express your displeasure with their acting like…well, like liberals.

As if the content of the law, including such things as saying the CEO of a corporation much appear in an ad paid for by the corporation, isn’t onerous and unconstutional enough, this two-tier implementation creating second-class citizens in terms of free speech is obviously unconstitutional as well.

However, it’s somewhat unlikely that the Supreme Court will ever hear a test case because this bill is somewhat unlikely to pass the Senate…and if it doesn’t pass the Senate now, it probably never will.

Then, this morning, it is being reported that House and Senate conferees reached agreement on a “financial reform” package.  I haven’t yet seen the details on what they’ve done with some controversial proposed law regarding derivatives trading.  No matter what they do, it will raise the cost of capital in America and hurt companies who use derivatives to hedge various risks.

Even worse than the derivatives stuff is the Consumer Protection Agency which will be created.  It will make loans much more expensive and difficult to get as some government bureaucrat looks over the shoulder of lending institutions saying at the same time that they’d better not “discriminate” in who gets a loan (code for “give money to people who probably won’t pay it back") while simultaneously presuming lenders to be at fault rather than the borrowers if a loan goes bad.  This thing will be the herpes of the credit market, never ever really going away even if, from time to time, it seems to have been tamed.  Repeal, which will be desired by many, will be extremely difficult politically.  So we’ll be saddled with this extra layer of nanny-state meddling cost-raising government for many years to come.  Oh, and there’s already at least one carve-out in that legislation, too: The “consumer protection” stuff about loans doesn’t apply to car dealers.

Watching these Dems in action is enough to make one sick.  There is no level they won’t stoop to in order to pass their economy- and republic-destroying “transformation” of America.  They don’t seem to realize that Americans know our nation’s relatively modest structural problems don’t call for wholesale changes to everything we hold dear in order to solve them.