Tag Archives: controversy

At our own White House official website.

Who would have guessed such attitudes would be so brazen, so despicable?

Wow. Just – wow.

UPDATE: AHA !! Now we know the real reason. It involves (mistaken) White House policy versus legal (?) actions and rewriting their website content to get them in synch. Of course, the Supreme Court has better information on what they should do instead. Way to go, Chief Justice Roberts.

But if the guys at the White House thought they could get away with this, they didn’t read footnote 10 of Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion for the court in Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett (citations and extraneous quotation marks omitted): “Prior to oral argument in this case, the Citizens Clean Elections Commission’s Web site stated that ‘The Citizens Clean Elections Act was passed by the people of Arizona in 1998 to level the playing field when it comes to running for office.’ The Web site now says that ‘The Citizens Clean Elections Act was passed by the people of Arizona in 1998 to restore citizen participation and confidence in our political system.’ ”

The court had previously held that preventing corruption was a “compelling state interest” that justified some restrictions on political speech. But as the chief justice noted, “we have repeatedly rejected the argument that the government has a compelling state interest in ‘leveling the playing field’ that can justify undue burdens on political speech.” The commission, a state government agency, was altering its public statements to bring them into line with its legal defense–precisely what the White House is now doing.