By Martin Schatz
The Obama administration is proposing new rules that would require companies making bids on government contracts to make visible their campaign contributions to candidates, parties and organizations. This means that war profiters, such as Halliburton, XE (formerly Blackwater), and General Electric would have to show who and what they gave campaign dollars too. The proposal is one of the efforts that left-leaning lawmakers have responded with in response to the 2010 Supreme Court decision that determined that corporations are actually citizens.
While it would seem that a proposal attempting to provide greater transparency and accountability to a system gone horribly wrong would be embraced by all concerned parties, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell feels differently.
[The proposed rules are] "an effort to silence or intimidate political adversaries' speech through the government contracting system."
Fear not, Mitch. XE and Halliburton do not fear us lowly peons.
Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, questioned why this would apply to government contractors instead of labor unions. Fair enough, and agreed. More transparency is better, regardless of which party's sacred cows are on the chopping block.
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