Free The Intimidation Game by Kimberley Strassel Page B

for finance regulation.
    (I felt obliged in our interview to break it to Smith that his elevator ride wasn’t all that special. When I was a young editor for the Wall Street Journal editorial page, one of my first jobs was editing Hunt’s weekly column. Hunt is a jolly, warm, and smart man, and I always enjoyed our weekly talks. He’s also known for a short fuse, and another of my jobs was to submit to the occasional Hunt scream-fest. It was my first lesson in hanging up on someone. To Al’s credit, he’d often follow these up with a wine-and-cheese basket, sent by way of apology. As a young and poorly paid staffer at that time, I occasionally joked whether, in moments of low funds, it might be worth provoking Al into a temper.)
    Smith points out that you also don’t have to be the average unknown citizen to feel intimidated. He himself is a respected academic, operating in a world of higher education that rarely practices the tolerance it preaches to its students. He ticks off the long list of ways that a university can make life difficult for a professor who practices the “wrong” politics. Want tenure? You may not get it. Want that deanship? Not likely. Want to teach a particular class? They may say no. Want more money in your department? Not possible. And the insidious part is that schools and faculties can access that disclosure information on the sly and make those judgments without ever admitting to them. “How do you even know when you are getting harassed?” notes Smith. “How do you know what jobs you didn’t get because of your political views?” Smith admits that even he at times has limited his political contributions to $199, just short of the enforced disclosure limit. “I’m a pretty tough guy. I like to think I meet Scalia’s standard for ‘courage.’ I’ve made a career of saying what I think, and standing by it. But there are times when I know a donation might disturb a social relationship I have, or a case that I’m working on, or a situation with an organization I’m connected to. Some people want to preserve family harmony; or they don’t want their neighbors to know what they are worth; or they don’t want their kids passed over for the varsity team. And that’s the point: There are all kinds of reasons why people, in different circumstances, might not want to broadcast their politics. What right has the government to force them to do so?” A lot of the intimidation is subtle, but Smith muses that it is only a matter of time before disclosure leads to deadly retribution—say the bombing or shooting of a pro–abortion rights or anti–gay marriage financial contributor.
    Smith’s other insight at the FEC: the degree to which disclosure is the hook for yet more speech laws. “It’s standard operating procedure for the pro-regulation crowd,” he explains. “They will say, ‘Well, we just need to know what this group or that group is doing.’ But once they have that information they will say, ‘Look, how bad it is what this group and that group are doing! We need more rules and regulations to stop it.’ And that’s how you end up with the insane system we have today.”
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    Smith became one of Washington’s loudest opponents of McCain-Feingold, an archnemesis to John McCain, and a big reason why the legislation barely passed the Senate. Among his predictions was that the law—the most massive and complex juggernaut of regulations yet—would set off an unprecedented round of political jockeying, as the dueling parties tried to game the new system to their electoral benefit. In this, too, he was right. Washington had done the Tillman Act, Smith-Connally, Taft-Hartley, FECA. But it was McCain-Feingold that laid the groundwork for a new era of political brutality, one that led directly to the left’s new tactics and the modern intimidation game.
    President Bush signed the law on March 27, 2002. Bush had publicly said that he thought parts of the law were