This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The fences are still up at the Capitol.

Now congressional Democrats are working to put fences up between constituents and their

elected representation and fetter speech online more generally.

Will Duffield is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, he discusses the unworkability of the current proposal.

H.R. 1 is the Democrats package of election reforms that they would like to see.

One of the major elements of that legislation that they've offered

is what's known as the Honest Ads Act,

which we've seen elements of in previous pieces of legislation, but what is basically in it?

So the Honest Ads Act was originally introduced in 2017 as a standalone bill intended to expand elements of the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act and apply them to the Internet.

It was motivated to a large extent by concerns about Russian meddling or ad purchases in the 2016 election.

And it has two main functioning parts that work together to really deliver a far bigger, more expansive change

than it might look like at first glance.

So the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 has long required

broadcast electioneering communications, defined as paid speech advocating for or against the election of a candidate to be accompanied

by a disclaimer identifying the organization behind the ad.

As well, most ad purchasers are required to file disclosures reporting their expenditures.

The Honest Ads Act changes this paradigm in two ways.

Firstly, it alters this definition of an electioneering communication from paid

speech relating to a particular candidate to paid speech concerning a national legislative issue of public

importance, which captures everything we would normally think of as issue ads, but not electioneering communications. Concerns about

...