The Nevada “Code of Fair Campaign Practices” is quite frankly a farce. Candidates are coerced and intimidated into “voluntarily” signing the form when they file for office. The pledge states, “I will not condone any dishonest or unethical practice which undermines the American system of free elections or impedes or prevents the full and free expression of the will of the voters.”

It is not candidates who undermine the American system of free elections or impede or prevent full and free expression. It is the state and federal government and their phony campaign/election reform laws.

Under the guise of protecting the public, government is engaged in political censorship and the abridgment of free speech.

The Supreme Court in Thomas v. Collins 1945 said, “The very purpose of the First Amendment is to foreclose public authority from assuming a guardianship of the public mind … In this field every person must be his own watchmen for truth, because the forefathers did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us.”

In Nevada, in a mock effort to guard the public, your opponents can charge you as a candidate with making false statements in your campaign. You will be hauled before the kangaroo court of the unelected bureaucrats of the Ethics Commission, denied due process and your constitutional right to trial by jury, found guilty, depending on whose political cronies are guarding the hen house, and fined thousands of dollars with no meaningful right to appeal. Clear and simple, it’s political censorship.

Our forefathers bled and died for the most important of all constitutionally protected speech — political free speech. It is painful to see that political speech is now made subject to the machinations of the unethical “Ethics” Commission, most recently charged with violating the state Open Meeting Law.

In 2001, the Nevada Assembly, at my urging, amended and passed AB 638, restoring the right to trial by jury for individuals and candidates who come under assault by the Ethics Commission’s speech police. But, the Senate, in its effort to protect incumbents and maintain the political hammer over the heads of candidates, amended out of the bill trial by jury.

We’ve not only lost our God-given right to free speech, but due process and right to trial by jury. The question must be asked: Have any of these artificial government contrivances for campaign reform improved the honesty or the integrity of a single candidate? Or have they simply benefited crooked candidates who cheat, while restricting the free speech of honest candidates. The voters are the real losers in all of this.

The U.S. Supreme Court said it best in NAACP v. Button 1963, “The First Amendment is a value-free provision whose protection is not dependent on the truth, popularity, or social utility of ideas and beliefs which are offered.”

So free speech is not even dependent upon the truth or the politically correct. And, in the famous words of Bill Clinton: What “is” truth?

We certainly cannot trust the government to tell us the truth, let alone assume it has any moral authority to determine whether or not our free speech “impedes or prevents the full and free expression of the will of the voters.” The state of Nevada and the federal government should get out of the speech police business and leave that in the hands of the “watchmen for truth,” We the People.

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Janine Hansen lives in Sparks.

Copyright © 2002 The Reno Gazette-Journal