I received some complaints yesterday about statements in my Personal Democracy Forum commentary suggesting that FEC Commissioner Brad Smith was engaged in hyperbole (and creating an intentional blogstorm) when he gave this C|NET interview predicting a coming crackdown on blogging. How did I know what the FEC was considering internally?
I had no inside information on the FEC’s internal deliberations; it is a black box. I made my assessment based upon the likelihood that the FEC Commissioners (whose actions I watch fairly closely) would agree to a coming crackdown on blogging.
But now we have some inside information on the FEC’s thought process. Someone faxed Mike Krempasky this March 10, 2005 FEC staff draft of the proposed rules for Internet communications (the documents have a fax date stamp of 3/24, with a time of just after 8 pm). The draft most certainly takes a much more regulatory position than the what appeared in the later draft circulated earlier this week and approved almost in the same form by the FEC commissioners.
What lesson to learn from this? Krempasky, writing at Redstate.org, states: “[W]e can prove that 1) Smith was right, and then some, 2) Had Smith not rung that bell, we may well have regretted it, 3) those on the FEC that criticized smith and told bloggers, in effect, to ‘chill out’ weren