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" Today, the Senate pretended to take up the DISCLOSE Act, which would require any organization that spends $10,000 or more during an election cycle to file a report within 24 hours, identifying any donors who gave $10,000 or more. It will require political groups posing as social-welfare organizations to disclose their donors and will prevent corporations and other wealthy interests from using shell corporations to funnel secret money to super PACs. It is, in fact, a response to the tsunami of anonymous corporate money that was unleashed on the political system by the Supreme Court&amp;#039;s decision in the Citizens United case. In fact, it may well be one of the only partial remedies allowable through simple legislation, since the decision itself appears to be capable of being overturned only by either a constitutional amendment \u2014 which would be fought in the state legislature by the same floodtide of money it seeks to reverse \u2014 or by a new and improved Supreme Court somewhere down the line. (Its name is, in fact, an anagram. It&amp;#039;s too damn hot to type the whole thing out. Do some of your own work, dammit.) I say pretended to take it up because everybody knows that the Republicans in the Senate, who once keened in transported devotion to the cause of &amp;quot;full disclosure&amp;quot; in our political system, were planning on killing the thing through the same kind of inaction they&amp;#039;ve used to kill everything else that&amp;#039;s come before them that was in any way worthwhile, even the stuff they thought up themselves, like individual mandates, and cap-and-trade policies. To them now add, full disclosure of campaign donations. How does this happen, you ask? Well, lo and behold, here&amp;#039;s a release from our good friends at FreedomWorks, who have designated the cloture vote on the DISCLOSE Act as a &amp;quot;key vote,&amp;quot; which means, &amp;quot;Vote our way or there&amp;#039;s a shoeless assistant DA out in the boonies who we&amp;#039;ll fatten up to take your job away next time.&amp;quot; As you might expect, FreedomWorks is acting here in its well-known capacity as the true heir to the civil-rights movement.... The DISCLOSE Act fails to preserve the anonymity of small donors. It is important to remember why this anonymity exists. As the civil rights movement was gaining steam in the late 1950s, opponents of the movement&amp;#039;s noble goals tried to silence supporters with government-mandated membership disclosure regimes. In 1958 the Supreme Court correctly sided with the NAACP in NAACP v Alabama, ensuring NAACP supporters could maintain anonymity so they would not be subject to personal, political, or commercial attacks. Let&amp;#039;s leave aside the notion that someone who contributes $10,000 to a campaign is a small donor. (Who knows? In the current system, as blessed by the genius of Anthony Kennedy and friends, that may just be true.) Let&amp;#039;s also pretend, for the moment, that the people running FreedomWorks wouldn&amp;#039;t have been on the other side of the issue from the NAACP in 1958 \u2014 here&amp;#039;s their states-rights index, if you want to guess more accurately \u2014 and concentrate simply on the fact that they clearly don&amp;#039;t know what in hell they&amp;#039;re talking about. In 1958, the Supreme Court &amp;quot;sided&amp;quot; with the NAACP because the NAACP was an organization incorporated in New York and, therefore, was not subject to the various laws Alabama ginned up to complicate things so Alabama didn&amp;#039;t have to desegregate its schools. (In the course of the litigation, as cited by Justice Harlan in his majority opinion, the NAACP did in fact give up a raft of documents to Alabama. It just refused to surrender its membership lists.) Also, the case turned on the Alabama law&amp;#039;s chilling effect on its citizens&amp;#039;s actual freedom of association. (Nothing in the DISCLOSE Act prohibits all the sugar daddies from continuing to whoop it up at FreedomWorks events, nor is it likely to.) Later in the opinion, Harlan wrote: &amp;quot;...Petitioner has made an uncontroverted showing that, on past occasions, revelations of the identity of its rank-and-file members has exposed these members to economic reprisal, loss of employment, threat of physical coercion, and other manifestations of public hostility.&amp;quot;  These things, it should be noted, and Harlan argued, are things that were demonstrably true because they had already happened, over and over again, going back to Reconstruction. Yeah, Dick Armey is the Medgar Evers of the new millennium. The comparison is inapt, to say nothing of historically indecent. FreedomWorks goes on to decry this awful attempt to make it more difficult for people to...wait for it...participate in the political process. When changing the rules of political participation, Congress should err on the side of encouraging participation, not discouraging it with ambiguous legalese that only empowers lawyers. Yeah, you pretty much know what&amp;#039;s coming next. And then there&amp;#039;s the nice-little-career-you-have-there-shame-if-anything-happened-to-it kicker. We will count their vote as a KEY VOTE when calculating the FreedomWorks Economic Freedom Scorecard for 2012. The Economic Freedom Scorecard is used to determine eligibility for the Jefferson Award, which recognizes members of Congress with voting records that support economic freedom. How, exactly, does finding out how much it costs some oil gozillionnaire to sublet a senator threaten anyone&amp;#039;s economic freedom? This is to argue for the property rights of burglars while they&amp;#039;re standing on your lawn. (Photo Illustration by DonkeyHotey via Flickr/Special to The Politics Blog) PLUS: More Political News &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a14872/disclose-act-senate-10725660/>