The Tea Party sweep that changed the face of U.S. politics in 2010 set American liberals on a mission to change the rules of free speech to regain the upper hand.
That’s according to Federal Election Commission Republican Lee E. Goodman, who suggested during an interview this week that the left has become one of the nation’s biggest threats to freedom of speech.
“It has triggered a very aggressive movement by people to amend the First Amendment, left intellectuals have placed it on the table,” Goodman said told Boston-based radio host Howie Carr.
“The general tenor of the Left in American politics today has certainly spoken out against First Amendment rights. It has been a reversal over the last 50 years,” he went on.
He said that the FEC frequently deals with complaints from the left that are obvious efforts to silence conservatives.
“I have been concerned about bias both in how complaints are brought to the commission just like in the way, the lobbying campaign for Lois Lerner. It was all one sided. But generally I try to make my First Amendment case by pointing out that we have to impact liberal and conservative speech in the same way. But I have been concerned from time to time about every time a conservative group comes up, somehow, some way, exceptions and distinctions are made and this is the problem giving government the power to regulate speech in the first instance because ultimately human beings have to make that decision,” he said.
“It’s now the left attacking conservative speakers, like free market speech because they are concerned that the big corporations might convince somebody, they might speak about free market economics,” he said, adding that liberals want to “chase them out of the democracy.”