Please read this carefully. This is a direct assault on Free Speech

What's happening? This bill will be considered by the Rules Committee today and will possibly be on the floor by tomorrow -- Friday.

Main Points:

- There are two ways people can exercise their First Amendment Right to Political Speech and support candidates: hard money and soft money. Hard money goes directly to a candidate's campaign, while soft money goes to pro or con ads by grassroots and other outside groups. Example: In 2004, you could either give to George Bush's campaign (hard money) or to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (soft money). Both options worked to defeat John Kerry.

- Don't be fooled by the Dems saying the DISCLOSE Act is about "fixing" money in politics. You'll see in the attached document that they already DOMINATE "hard money" giving to candidates. The DISCLOSE Act does not regulate "hard money" contributions, because the Ds already own this area.

- They hate playing by the rules, so now they're trying to shut up the one way that Conservative Citizens can really impact politics: grassroots organizations. We are currently competitive in this area, so they need to stop our voices.

- How they're doing this:

* The DISCLOSE Act would extend the FEC’s regulatory authority to all “covered communications,” including the blogosphere. Interestingly, it exempts traditional/MSM from this new extension of authority!

* Imposes new limits on nonprofit advocacy groups. The DISCLOSE Act would force these groups to give the government their membership lists! They can only avoid this by creating a new type of political action committee called a "campaign related activities account."

* Requires nonprofit groups to feature their six biggest donors in any ad that they run. This will scare many donors away from giving money to conservative groups.

* Imposes spending limits on companies, not unions. Any corporation with a federal contract greater than $50,000 (which is a very low limit) is prohibited from making ANY independent expenditures or election communications. This ban does not apply to unions.

* The law would require any business or organization making political expenditures to create and maintain an extensive, highly sophisticated (an expensive) website with advanced search features to track its political activities.

* Bans any expenditures by American companies with 20% or more foreign ownership, but none on unions, even though SEIU and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers have HUGE numbers of foreign members and directors. Don't believe the lies that this protects Americans: foreign nationals are already prohibited from participating in U.S. elections...this bill just makes participation by American citizen shareholders in a company that has some foreign ownership illegal.

* From the Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703460404575244772070...): "As a result, small businesses, grass-roots organizations, and union locals that maintain only basic websites would be discouraged from making any expenditures for political advocacy, because doing so would require them to spend thousands of dollars to upgrade their websites and purchase software to report information that is already readily available to the public from the FEC. Large companies and unions could probably meet this requirement, so once again the bill benefits large, institutional players over small businesses and grass-roots organizations."

- Bottom Line: The DISCLOSE Act intends to silence conservative voices forever...regardless of the First Amendment. See the attached flyer for more information

Campaign+Finance.pdf