Meet the new boss, same as the old boss:

House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) has pledged to take up a lobbying reform proposal that would impose new regulations on speech by grassroots organizations, while providing a loophole in the rules for large corporations and labor unions.

 The legislation would make changes to the legal definition of “grassroots lobbying” and require any organization that encourages 500 or more members of the general public to contact their elected representatives to file a report with detailed information about their organization to the government on a quarterly basis.

The report would include identifying the organization’s expenditures, the issues focused on and the members of Congress and other federal officials who are the subject of the advocacy efforts. A separate report would be required for each policy issue the group is active on.

“Right now, grassroots groups don’t have to report at all if they are communicating with the public,” said Dick Dingman of the Free Speech Coalition, Inc. “This is an effort that would become a major attack on the 1st Amendment.” 

Nothing annoys me more than people who claim that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans.  Not only is this patently absurd, but it betrays a complete lack of rational thought, observation, insight, and plain common sense.  When people say this, I assume they mean that on certain important issues, there is no difference.  Both parties, for example, are economic neoliberals and are consequently beholden to large corporate interests.  Moreover, both parties are addicted to their own power that they pursue further entrenchment to whatever degree they can manage. 

Even in a supposedly representative democracy, they government functions as a singular entity in which the minority rule the majority.  Grassroots organization has always posed a serious threat to this form of elitism.  However, the power of grassroots organizations to reach a wider audience has increased by several orders of magnitude alongside the digital revolution.  We can argue, of course, that this is part of democracy’s evolutionary process.  And in a zero-sum power game, any power increase for populism is axiomatically a power decrease for the establishment pols. 

I have been hard in the past on the GOP.  Moreover, I will freely admit that there is a certain element of the Democratic Party with which I identify.  But this does NOT translate into any kind of free pass for authoritarian trajectories.  Pelosi is dead wrong on this bill my bile and venom to politicians of either party who try to exceed the mandate of their authority.