Beware "Reform"

George Will doesn't get many issues right these days, but when he does he's still a joy to read. The election process is definitely one of those issues, as he provides another example of what happens when the feds nationalize a problem in the name of "reforming" it:

For over two centuries before Congress passed HAVA, Americans voted. Really. Unlike today, those who were elected - Clay, Webster, Lincoln and lesser lights - often were more complex and sophisticated than the voting machinery.

Using pencils to make marks on paper and later using machines to punch holes in paper ballots, voters - without federal help; imagine - caused Congresses and presidents to come and go. States ran elections; some ran them better than others. Some ballots have been better designed than others, as have some voting machines. Most have been adequate. The gross defects of American voting practices were laws that established or permitted discrimination and other abuses. Tardily, but emphatically, those laws were changed and other abuses were halted.

Then came 2000 and Florida and the 36-day lawyers' scrum about George W. Bush's 537-vote margin of victory. In response to which, Congress passed HAVA, which in 2006 may produce fresh confirmation of the prudential axiom that the pursuit of the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Classic (as opposed to classical) liberalism. Fabricate or exaggerate a problem, assume that the states and/or the people are too bumblingly stupid to come up with their own solutions, take it away from them and impose upon them a one-size-fits-all fix that fits none, doesn't work, costs a fortune, and screws up the system even worse than it was before.

Seriously, is it really that difficult to pull a lever, punch a hole in a card, or connect an arrow with a pen and feed it into a machine that beeps and spits out one of those little "I voted" stickers that my car would be overflowing with if I'd actually kept them all these years? I've used all three methods over the past quarter-century and I've never had a problem exercising my franchise. It's nothing more than simply following a few straight-forward directions, something any adult without an extra chromosome should be able to figure out.

However, the feds didn't agree. And now look what we're stuck with:

Four years later, HAVA has turned a highly-successful voting infrastructure into a nightmare. Maryland voters may have to abandon the voting booth altogether and use absentee ballots to avoid the malfunctining electronic voting machines. Ohio found out that their electronic voting machine security codes have been exposed, meaning that someone could theoretically hack into the machines and change the votes. And in the aftermath of the Florida recounts, the geniuses that pushed these machines through HAVA never planned on paper receipts for recounts in close elections....

Segue alert! Segue alert!

....Not coincidentally, HAVA came from the same session of Congress (107th) that
produced the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, otherwise known as the McCain-Feingold Act. The BCRA also represented an effort to "reform" the political system by treating voters as incapable little children, despite 200 years of proof to the contrary. The BCRA continues to do damage to free political speech, although not as spectacularly as HAVA has done to the credibility of our elections.

Campaign finance "reform" was a bad idea whose time came 'round at last when Darth Queeg and Fussy Russy finally found a way around Mitch McConnell and called George W. Bush's signature bluff. Has it "gotten money out of politics"? Oh, hell, no - it's just driven it underground where public accountability for it is even more remote than it was pre-"reform":

Unions, corporations and wealthy individuals have pumped nearly $300 million this year into unregulated political groups, funding dozens of aggressive and sometimes shadowy campaigns independent of party machines.

The groups, both liberal and conservative, air TV and radio spots, conduct polls, run phone banks, canvass door-to-door and stage get-out-the-vote rallies, with no oversight by the Federal Election Commission. Set up as tax-exempt "issue advocacy" committees, they cannot explicitly endorse candidates. But they can do everything short of telling voters how to mark their ballots.

Because they can accept unlimited donations from any source, the committees — known as 527s — have emerged as the favored vehicle for millionaires and interest groups seeking to set the political agenda. ...

Named for a section of the IRS code, 527s have been around for years but became a political force in 2004 after the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 — also known as the McCain-Feingold Bill — limited donations to political parties. Groups such as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth on the right and America Coming Together on the left contributed $600 million that year, with a heavy focus on the presidential race.

Hard not to notice the LA Times' bias in this story - that 527s should be silenced as well (or just the conservative ones, anyway). But look at "reform"'s practical results - decreasing the influence over the political process of ordinary voters and increasing the influence of the elites, to say nothing of the political class itself.

And, of course, the biggest 527 of them all, the Enemy Media:

CNN has been on an anti-Bush rampage unseen in its political activism since Rathergate put the phony Texas Air National Guard documents on the air. Its "Broken Government" special and anti-Rumsfeld rants dominate its pre-election "coverage". Which didn't escape Mrs. Cheney. Here's the money quote from October 27, CNN last Friday night:

MRS. CHENEY: Well, you know, right there, Wolf, "Broken Government." Now, what kind of stance is that? Here we are. We're a country where we have been mightily challenged over the past six years. We've been through 9/11. We've been through Katrina. The president and the vice president inherited a recession. We're a country where the economy is healthy. That's not broken. This government has acted very well. We've had tax cuts that are responsible for our healthy economy. We're a country that was attacked five years ago. We haven't been attacked since. What this government has done is effective. That's not broken government...

BLITZER: You worked ...

L. CHENEY: I watched your program last night and I was troubled.

BLITZER: All right. Well, that was probably the purpose, to get people to think, to get people to discuss these issues because a lot of conservatives and ...

L. CHENEY: Well, all right, Wolf. I'm here to talk about my book, but if you want to talk about distortion...

BLITZER: We'll talk about your book.

L. CHENEY: Well, right, but what is CNN doing running terrorist tape of terrorists shooting Americans? I mean, I thought Duncan Hunter asked you a very good question and you didn't answer it. Do you want us to win?

BLITZER: The answer, of course, is we want the United States to win. We are Americans. There's no doubt about that. Do you think we want terrorists to win?

L. CHENEY: Then why are you running terrorist propaganda?

BLITZER: With all due respect - with all due respect, this is not terrorist propaganda....

Oh, c'mon, Wolf. You're caught, and you know it. Media bias is a thing of the past. You, and the others like you in the 527 Media, are producing campaign commercials for the Democrats and trying to pass them off as news.

And the only way the center-right has to counter those campaign commercials for the Democrats is 527 groups, which the left just loves except when the occasional Swiftboat Veterans For Truth comes along and blows them out of the water. If they have their way (conservative) 527s will be regulated into submission right alongside political parties and the "fairness" doctrine will be resurrected to decapitate talk radio, all in the service of campaign "reform"'s real, ultimate goal: extinguish public expression of all views that run counter to and dissent from the liberal "party" line as imposed by the Enemy Media. Restore the left-wing media, cultural, and political monopoly that Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich slew and buried over the past generation.

These men and those of like mind have been the true reformers, and their liberal foes the true reactionaries. Campaign and election "reforms" are meant to undo their real reforms and turn back the clock to the bad old days of one-party statism by stacking the deck against conservatives and Republicans. They are designed and intended to undermine democracy by supressing political speech and undermining the integrity of the electoral process, which somehow always seems to work to the advantage of Democrats.

It's appallingly ironic that HAVA and BCRA were passed by a GOP Congress and signed into law by the same president whom the Dems tried to rob blind in 2000. It'll be a credit to a number of factors if the Republicans can escape the 2006 bed they so sorely helped to short-sheet, but partisan prudence and fealty to the First Amendment and constitutionalism in general will not be among them.