You’ve no doubt heard liberal Members of Congress and other interest groups calling the Tea Party movement “Astroturf,” a play on the term grassroots. Like our good friend Nancy, for example…
Or the liberal pro-net neutrality group Free Press, which has an entire section on its site devoted to “outing” so-called Astroturf operations. This page includes a handy-dandy widget with a graphic of large corporations pulling the strings of Congress. Pretty clever, really.
They claim that the whole movement is the invention of a bunch of Beltway insiders backed by piles of corporate cash. For them, it simply does not compute that ordinary Americans could be fed up with trillions of dollars in debt, tax hikes, and runaway regulation. It MUST be the orchestrations of rich puppet-masters in DC, right? Instead of spending hours debunking those claims, I’ll point to a post I made on the National Taxpayers Union’s old blog after the massive 9/12 March on Washington. Several hundred thousand people from all across the country, none of whom were paid, will do a better job of dismissing these silly claims than I could here. Instead, let’s focus on liberal activists employing exactly the kind of shady strategies that they accuse us of using.
So, that group I mentioned, Free Press? The ones that have a page on their site to expose “Astroturfing?” Last week, they were outed as being the true authors behind a letter supposedly written by Congressman Jay Inslee (D-WA). The letter is being passed around to various Congressional offices to solicit support for FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s radical effort to thumb his nose at the limits of his regulatory authority, which I blogged about here recently. But the properties of the electronic file itself show that the real author of the letter was not Mr. Inslee or a member of his staff, but none other than Free Press Policy Director Ben Scott!
Now, it should be noted that this practice isn’t exactly rare in Congress. Members routinely have lobbyists write talking points, letters, and even legislation. Some of it is relatively harmless, in that those lobbyists have special knowledge about the issue and lend their expertise to Congressional offices. Some of it, however, is not so harmless. Occasionally, there are news reports about special interest groups carving out exceptions for themselves through this kind of process.
To paraphrase President Obama, let me be clear: I’m not accusing Free Press of shady back-door dealing. They’re an interest group pursuing net neutrality, a policy that I happen to think is a terrible idea. For his part, Jay Inslee is just a fellow traveler who happened to get caught red-handed outsourcing the writing of a letter to his colleagues. I’m simply pointing out that Free Press is engaged in exactly the kind of coordination and manipulation that they and others (wrongly) accuse conservative groups like the National Taxpayers Union and FreedomWorks of all the time.
It makes you wonder, what else has Free Press written? So, Free Press, what say you? What other seemingly spontaneous pro-net neutrality efforts have you coordinated? How many other letters or bills have you written behind closed doors without getting caught?