At Politico Arena, today’s focus is on the Court and campaign finance.

My comment:

The Citizens United decision is barely out, and incumbent members of Congress are vowing to restore restrictions on political speech.

Sen. Russell Feingold (D‑WI) said: “In the coming weeks, I will work with my colleagues to pass legislation restoring as many of the critical restraints on corporate control of our elections as possible.”

In the House of Representatives, Robert Brady, Chairman of the House Administration Committee — the panel responsible for campaign finance regulations — sent out an email that said: “I will be working directly with my colleagues, the Leadership and the White House to study the Court’s decision and to put together a timeline for legislative action that ensures the Court’s decision will not define the ways elections are conducted in 2010.”

It is difficult to see how Feingold, Brady and other members of Congress will be able to get around the clear and certain language of the Citizens United decision. But they will try. Nothing worries members more than free and critical speech, especially when the upcoming election already looks really bad for incumbents.

Terrorism is a strategy of the weak. Without power of their own, terrorists seek to goad states into overreactions that bestow favors on their otherwise inconsequential movements and ideologies.

When a state goes to war, for example, this wastes its own blood and treasure, driving the costs of its own policies higher and weakening its own military and economy. Overreaction drives support to terrorism when innocents or perceived innocents are harmed or killed by overreacting states. And overreaction tends to energize and promote terrorism worldwide by confirming the narrative that incumbent powers are evil—the portrayal of the United States as an occupier of Muslim lands and exploiter of Muslim people is an example.

With the logic of terrorism in hand, the appropriate responses come into focus. Constant pressure on terror groups worldwide; cool, phlegmatic response to terrorist attacks; constant study of terror groups, their relationships, plans, and methods; counter-rhetoric exposing the venality and bloodiness of terror groups themselves; exploitation of fissures among the many different groups that have been drawn to the “al Qaeda” brand; and so on.

Unfortunately, many people focused intently on prosecuting the war on terror have yet to digest the nature of the challenge or orient their responses accordingly. Presuming a large, united terrorist front with substantial technical and logistical capabilities, they urge the reactions that would be appropriate for an invading state. They deride as dangerous the tailored responses dictated by sound counterterrorism strategy.

Unfortunately, they are counseling overreaction to this enemy, which is far less lethal than a state, if harder to locate and extinguish. The guns of terror warriors are the wrong caliber, and they’re pointed the wrong direction.

Daniel Popeo writes today in the Washington Examiner that legal activism aids terrorists. It doesn’t. It shows that the United States is not frightened, and is not thrown off its game, by attacks and attempts like that of December 25th. Indomitability, not ferocity, will be the hallmark of our counterterrorism success.

Review our recent forum on counterterrorism here, and our counterterrorism conference of a year ago here.

Today the Supreme Court struck a major blow for free speech by correctly holding that government cannot try to “level the political playing field” by banning corporations from making independent campaign expenditures on films, books, or even campaign signs.

As Justice Kennedy said in announcing the opinion, “if the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits jailing citizens for engaging in political speech.”

While the Court has long upheld campaign finance regulations as a way to prevent corruption in elections, it has also repeated that equalizing speech is never a valid government interest.

After all, to make campaign spending equal, the government would have to prevent some people or groups from spending less than they wished. That is directly contrary to protecting speech from government restraint, which is ultimately the heart of American conceptions about the freedom of speech.

No case demonstrates this idea better than Citizens United, where a nonprofit corporation made no donations to candidates but rather spent money to spread its ideas about Hillary Clinton independent of the campaigns of primary opponent Barack Obama, potential general election opponent John McCain, or any other candidates. Where is the “corruption” if the campaign(s) being supported have no knowledge, let alone control over what independent actors do? — be they one person, two people, or a large group?

Today’s ruling may well lead to more corporate and union election spending, but none of this money will go directly to candidates — so there is no possible corruption or even “appearance of corruption.” It will go instead to spreading information about candidates and issues. Such increases in spending should be welcome because studies have shown that more spending — more political communication — leads to better-informed voters.

In short, the Citizens United decision has strengthened both the First Amendment and American democracy.

For more background on the case, here’s a primer:

Today, Politico Arena asks:

“Do they get it?”

My response:

Do the Democrats get it? A good many of them, like so much of the mainstream media, have long taken their cue from The New York Times editorial page. This morning the Great Gray Lady sallies forth, ideological blinders in place, to pronounce that, “To our minds, [Tuesday’s result] is not remotely a verdict on Mr. Obama’s presidency, nor does it amount to a national referendum on health care reform.” Not remotely? Those Democratic office-holders who continue to sip from that purblind well will soon have plenty of time to do so.

But Republican performance in recent years has hardly inspired. To their credit, however, Republicans tend to subscribe to principles about government that are closer to the nation’s founding principles — if only they would abide by them. And so one hopes that, after Tuesday, they will come better to “get it.”

From the DCCC comes this little beauty:

While making today’s announcement that he will once again run for Congress in New York’s 24^th district, [Candidate for New York’s 24th Congressional Disctrict Richard] Hanna also launched a new campaign website where he shamelessly touts his ties to the CATO [sic] Institute, a right wing extremist group that has long been a vocal advocate for extremist, unfair trade policies that would allow companies to ship American jobs overseas [emphasis mine].

The fact that Hanna is touting his leadership role in a group that prides its commitment to unfair trade policies that send American jobs overseas is downright shameful,” said Shripal Shah, Northeast Regional Press Secretary at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. 

To clarify, the press release quotes Hanna’s campaign website, which makes clear that Hanna is “a sustaining member of the CATO Institute, having traveled to Russia as part of an international study group. ” That means he gives Cato between $500 and $999 per year  and went on a Cato-organized trip to Russia.

 The DCCC’s release goes on:

The CATO Institute is a right wing extremist group that has long advocated for unfair trade policies regardless of their impact on American jobs. [emphasis theirs] CATO has been one of the leading advocates for unfair trade deals and believes that increases in unemployment should not prevent enacting new trade deals. The CATO Policy Handbook specifically says Congress should “avoid using trade deficits and concerns about employment levels as excuses for imposing trade restrictions” as it calls for the US to move away from “reciprocity’’ and “level playing fields.” [CATO Policy Handbook, 6^th ed, Chapter 64.

Should I thank them for linking to our handbook?

On a personal note, I am due to renew my visa in March. Can anyone advise me on whether this characterization of Cato’s Center for Trade Policy Studies will jeapordize its renewal?

HT: Jonathan Blanks

Update: for a broader look at the inanity of the DCCC’s characterization of Cato as a “right-wing extremist” group, see this excellent blog post by Cato Media Fellow Radley Balko.

Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts seems to reflect some of the trends David Kirby and I note in our new study, “The Libertarian Vote in the Age of Obama,” released today. We wrote, “Libertarians seem to be a lead indicator of trends in centrist, independent-minded voters. If libertarians continue to lead the independents away from Obama, Democrats will lose 2010 midterm elections they would otherwise win.” That seems to have happened in Virginia, New Jersey, and now Massachusetts. Young voters, whom we examine in the study, also seem to have moved sharply in Massachusetts from heavy support for Obama in 2008 to slightly less strong support for Brown this week.

Using our strict screen based on American National Election Studies data, we find that 14 percent of voters were libertarian in 2008. Other analysts using broader criteria find larger numbers. Gallup calculates the distribution of ideology every year and found that libertarians made up 23 percent of respondents in their 2009 survey. Our analysis of data from a 2007 Washington Post-ABC News poll found that people with libertarian views were 26 percent of respondents. And a Zogby poll found that 59 percent of Americans would describe themselves as “fiscally conservative and socially liberal,” while 44 percent would accept the description “fiscally conservative and socially liberal, also known as libertarian.”

Libertarian voters swung away from Bush and the GOP in 2004 and 2006, but in 2008 they swung back, voting for McCain by 71 to 27 percent, presumably because the prospect of a Democratic president with a Democratic Congress in the midst of a financial crisis was frightening to small-government voters. Also, while many libertarian intellectuals had a real antipathy to McCain, the typical libertarian voter saw McCain as an independent, straight-talking maverick who was a strong opponent of earmarks and pork-barrel spending and never talked about social issues.

One encouraging point in the study: libertarians may be becoming more organized. In our 2006 study we wrote, “Social conservatives have evangelical churches, the Christian Coalition, and Focus on the Family.… Liberals have unions.… Libertarians have think tanks.” In the past three years, however, libertarians have become a more visible, organized force in politics, particularly as campaigns move online. Note the Ron Paul campaign and the heavy libertarian involvement in the widespread and decentralized “Tea Party” movement.

The new study also includes new data on young libertarian voters, Ron Paul voters, libertarians and abortion, “secular centrist” voters, and how libertarians voted for Congress in the past five elections.