Free and secret speech

As head of the Christian Coalition of Maine, Paul Volle was part of a large network of individuals and organizations backing the referendum question decided yesterday on partial-birth abortions. At the same time, Mr. Volle almost single-handedly shredded Maine’s well-meaning but flawed laws regarding the public disclosure of contributors to political action committees.

Early last month, Mr. Volle convinced U.S. District Court Judge D. Brock Hornby to invalidate the statute requiring anyone who spends more than $50 on a ballot issue to register as a PAC and to make public personal financial information. Clearly, the $50 bar was much too low and had the effect, perhaps unintended by lawmakers, of stifling political activism at the grassroots level. The Attorney General’s office reacted to this defeat by conceding, with considerable understatement, that the PAC-registration law needs fine-tuning.

Mr. Volle prevailed again last week, when Judge Hornby suspended the state law requiring disclosure statements of who pays for political ads. The Federal Communications Commission regulation requiring disclosure on radio and television ads remains intact, not because Judge Hornby wanted to create confusion, but because the state law was what was being challenged in his court.

State law requires that all ads — print, broadcast, posters and bumper stickers — provide the name and address of the responsible PAC. But the state law went a step further with radio and television ads by requiring they, and only they, include this statement as well: “A copy of our report is available from and may be viewed at the office of the Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices.”

It’s a mouthful, and, as Mr. Volle correctly observed, it gobbles up lot of expensive air time — especially in radio, where the spoken word is the only option. His estimate that the state-mandated disclosure statements could consume up as much as half of a 30-second radio spot is not an exaggeration.

The suspension is not Judge Hornby’s final word on the matter, but it is unlikely his opinion that the law is an unconstitutional infringement of free speech will change. The Supreme Court has ruled that anonymous political speech deserves First Amendment protection and, as the judge remarked in his decision, “what the Constitution protects and what good judgment or good policy permits are often two entirely different things.”

The public clearly wants to know the source of the money behind candidates and causes. At the same time, political activists are increasingly eager to equate money with speech and speech, even anonymous speech, with First Amendment protection.

Secrecy in politics is distasteful and troubling, but secrecy in speech is protected and the laws requiring disclosure are no match for the First Amendment. The law may not be able to force political activists to divulge their secrets; the good judgment and good policy they exhibit by being open and candid may, in the end, be nothing more than one more piece of valuable information for voters to consider as they mark their ballots.