This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Sunday, November 27th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President-elect Donald Trump routinely spews harsh words for those who criticize him, but how will that

translate into policy regarding unfettered political speech?

David Keating is president of the Center for Competitive Politics.

We spoke last week.

The defenses of free political speech, you indicated before we started recording here,

seem to be situational for political actors.

That is, does my party or my unique message

suffer under this rule versus that rule?

And if it does, then I'll oppose that rule but if I

sense I can punish my opponents then I'll support this rule because it'll tilt

the playing field toward me. Is that about right?

I think that's often quite right.

Usually there's often an attitude of what's in this for me,

either me as an individual politician or elected official or me what's good for my party.

And you look at even the recent history of this, I'll go back to McCain-Feingold. You know, this was a bill that would have

made it a criminal offense for an organization to run a radio or TV ad that mentioned the name of a candidate within 60 days an election.

So if you ran an organization, you ran an ad like that that just mentioned the name of a candidate,

you could go to jail. I mean,'s crazy right you would think but President Bush back then I think he made a

calculation that well on balance this is going to help my re-election, so I'll sign it.

Fast forward to 2006, Republicans are in political trouble, 527 organizations, it's part of the tax code, were pounding Republicans for their votes on various things that liberal groups didn't like, and Republicans were feeling the political pain.

...