This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 16, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Disclose Act is an end run around the Citizens United Free Speech ruling from the Supreme Court,

but where it attempts to use disclosure as a club

to wield against groups that might say controversial things in public, that's not the

only way the act stifles free political expression. John Samples, director of the Cato Institute's

Center for Representative Government, explains.

Supreme Court hands down a major decision in January, Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission. It opens up political speech and

spending on speech in big ways. Groups with corporate form, non-profits, businesses, labor unions, all get to poor money into campaigns to generate speech.

Now from Congress's point of view, that's not necessarily a great thing. So really what we see now is a

scrambling around by Congress to try to respond to that Supreme Court decision and to restore the status quo ante to try to make the world the way it was.

And that's what the Disclose Acts about.

Basically what the Supreme Court left them with was one major tool to try to control speech and a couple of minor ones.

The major tool which was explicitly supported

in Citizens United is disclosure.

So the Disclose Act does indeed

have lots of different kinds of disclosures for spending by largely corporations.

That is, for example, corporations that support ads their CEOs will have to go on and

say they explicitly support the message there's good the top funders will have to be supported it's really a lot of

disclosure that as much as is included in the contributions area at least in the

past but I think that's not what they're counting on really to deal with Citizens United.

There's a couple of prohibitions in the bill as it stands now.

...