Republicans in Congress will try to pass a stopgap spending bill this week to avert a partial government shutdown and keep the government running through September, though they’ll need Democrats’ help to do it.
The 99-page stopgap spending bill, which House Republicans released over the weekend, is required since lawmakers haven’t made any progress conferencing the dozen annual government funding bills that were supposed to become law by Oct. 1.
The continuing resolution, the third since October, would fund the federal government for the rest of fiscal year 2025 — marking the first time since fiscal 2013 that Congress has leaned on stopgap spending bills for the entire year, according to a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
And what do you think publicly funded elections will lead to?
Everybody in a competition is going to want a leg up, beyond what is allowed by the publicly funded elections. They’re going to take every edge that they can get. Which means they’re going to look for social media influencers or other wealthy people to “independently” endorse them. They’ll be looking for the Elon Musks of the world to “independently” do the work that they’re prohibited from doing. And this doesn’t even count the ones that will legitimately endorse a candidate on their own. Either way, it’ll literally be a race to see who can rack up the most celebrity endorsements to get around campaign rules one way or the other.
And no, you cannot restrict free speech the way you described. “Harmful to the public good” means not yelling fire in a crowded theater. When you start going down the road of censoring political speech by claiming it’s “harmful to the public good”, that’s blatant censorship of speech. It’s a violation of free speech, free expression, free press, and the right to petition government. You are literally advocating censorship of political opinions. What do you think Trump would do with a rule like that? Any non-MAGA opinion would automatically be classified as “harmful to the public good”.
Disallowing social media influencers from promoting candidates would no more violate free speech rights than banning churches from doing so does.
First, I challenge you to step into just about any church and see how well that “banning churches from doing so” works in practice. Give me about 30 seconds to do a youtube search for megachurch pastors who do that on the daily. Those rules are about as strictly enforced as jaywalking.
And with that said, the fact that you do not know the difference between the ban on political speech in churches (for what little that’s even worth) and banning a private citizen (which is all a social media influencer is) from doing so. How do you even define “social media influencer”? Is it just the Logan Pauls and Mr. Beasts of the world? If I, a complete nobody, made a bunch of anti-Trump speeches that just happen to go viral and get millions of views, am I suddenly a social media influencer that is no longer allowed to make those speeches? Give me a definition for “social media influencer”, and I’ll give you 10 ways that a political candidate will get around those rules on day one.
