The News Gazette

Veto bill that limits speech
Thursday June 5, 2008
The Legislature has sent Gov. Rod Blagojevich a bill that restricts who can contribute to political candidates. The governor should veto the bill as a limitation on free speech.
The idea that Gov. Rod Blagojevich wants "to really do sweeping things," as he has said, to an ethics bill that lawmakers sent him is pretty funny. Mentioning "Blagojevich" and "ethics" in the same sentence will do that. This is the man, remember, who apparently has used lists of state contractors and vendors to raise money for his campaigns, who once promised to "rock the system" with his own ethics bill but never delivered a plan, and whose administration is under investigation by federal prosecutors.
So now the governor is suggesting that he can improve a bill that supporters contend will help end pay-to-play politics in Illinois. The legislation, approved without a single "no" vote in either the House or the Senate, would ban businesses seeking state contracts of $50,000 or more from making campaign contributions to the state officials who award the contracts. It clearly was aimed at Blagojevich who, according to a newspaper investigation, got about three-fourths of his campaign donations from those firms doing business with the state, those lobbying the state or those facing state regulation.
Proponents of the legislation fear the governor will make revisions to the bill, perhaps extending it to include legislators and political parties, that make it so distasteful that lawmakers would have to try to override his changes.
It would be better, in our opinion, if the governor just outright vetoed the bill. The ethics proposal, like the federal McCain-Feingold law and other such proposals, limits campaign spending which limits free speech. If the government restricts someone's right to contribute money to a candidate, a party or a cause, it is restricting speech.
If Blagojevich really wants to do something "sweeping," he would veto the pay to play bill sent him by the Legislature.
And he would propose stringent campaign disclosure laws that would give Illinoisans immediate and unrestricted access to information about who is contributing how much to public officials, political parties and interest groups.