(Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)



(Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)



The Obama administration’s most prominent effort to limit speech is the so-called DISCLOSE Act, a bill that grew out of the president’s public, and unseemly, rebuke of the Supreme Court in early 2010. This proposed law, an attempt to get around the court’s decision in Citizens United, would compel grass-roots groups to disclose the names of their supporters.

Unlimited corporate campaign spending is not very popular with the general public. So what's a Republican politician who loves it to do? Simple: describe efforts to strengthen campaign finance laws as "amending the First Amendment" to "muzzle free speech." That's a claim that can be found in the right-wing media and now in a Politico op-ed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.The "grass-roots groups" in danger of having to disclose names of supporters include Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS , and the "supporters" in question are secret donors whose money is going to campaign attack ads. And what McConnell dances around throughout his op-ed is that the freedom of speech he's talking about is the freedom of anonymous spending and corporate spending.

You can bet that Frank Luntz or one of his Republican messaging ilk has focus-grouped this to death. The good news is that apparently popular sentiment for overturning Citizens United is strong enough that you would never even know that's what they were talking about. As McConnell frames it:



The courts have said Congress doesn’t have the authority to muzzle political speech. So the president plans to silence his opponents by amending the First Amendment itself. Now, this is radicalism.

The bad news is that you can expect to hear this again and again and again and again. Expect to hear Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and Eric Cantor and Michele Bachmann repeat it until—and this is an important step—David Gregory and Wolf Blitzer pick it up and start using it as a neutral description of efforts to bring transparency to campaign spending and clarify that corporations are not people. Democrats have dozens of messages that, right now, would kick the crap out of this. Now they just need to decide on one and repeat it as often as Republicans repeat "amending the First Amendment."