FreedomTalks

Human Events reporter Amanda Carpenter has the story.

Last night, Sen. Bob Bennett (R.-Utah) succeeded in passing his amendment to the Senate ethics bill that preserved communication rights for grassroots organizations.

The Senate’s version of the bill, S.1, had contained a measure that would require grassroots organizations to report communications made to 500 or more members of the general public if that message encouraged those persons to contact their elected representatives on a specific policy issue on a quarterly basis.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R.-S.C.) explained in a January 18 conference call to rally bloggers against Section 220 of S.1, which contained the language that it “would make just about everyone a lobbyist, including people who wrote their senators a couple of times. The penalties would be enormous, $100,000 fine and 10 years in prison, and that could affect bloggers urging people to call their congressman.”

This entry was posted on Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 10:30 am and is filed under Grassroots Tactics, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.