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Senator Patrick Leahy, Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act
By Daniel Greenfield
November 22, 2010
When Senators give speeches, they will say that you can’t put a price on freedom. But as it turns out you can. You can actually put an exact dollar amount on the Constitution. And that amount is $335,906.
That’s the amount that Hollywood gave Senator Patrick Leahy. And in return, Leahy gave them COICA. That’s not the same of some new disease, it’s the abbreviation for Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, the biggest and more comprehensive internet censorship proposal in the history of this country. It would give Attorney General Eric Holder the power to create a blacklist of websites and force all companies that do business in the United States to comply with that blacklist.
Ever since the Clinton Administration’s Communications Decency Act, Democrats have been obsessed with censoring the internet. And that drive has kicked into high gear again. COICA is the most ambitious plan to enact government control over freedom of expression on the internet since the days of the CDA.
While this bill was crafted on behalf of the entertainment industry, the applications go far beyond that. Websites that feature collections of articles, such as FreeRepublic or DemocraticUnderground could easily be targeted under the terms of COICA. And so could many blogs, which list entire articles or cite extensively from them. Any site or blog that embeds videos or images which are not authorized by the copyright holder could be similarly targeted. And with the Attorney General of a highly politicized administration wielding the power to preemptively shutter and blacklist entire websites, it would be all too easy for COICA to be used as a club for suppressing dissent.
While on paper COICA is only supposed to apply to 0.01 percent of the internet, in its broadest interpretation it could apply to anywhere between 30/40 percent of the internet. And the damage can go even beyond that. COICA gives the AG’s office a billy club that can destroy any company’s business overnight. And will that billy club be used strictly for copyright oversight alone? When the Attorney General’s office has the power to shut down any webhost, costing its owners millions in revenues, what will the owners do when they’re asked to shut down a site that does not actually fall under COICA? Will they call the AG’s bluff and prepare for a legal battle to restore the site and hope their business survives, or will they do the practical thing and comply?
We already know the answer to that. Some larger companies with deep pockets will put up a fight. Maybe. Smaller companies will just go along. And this is not what free speech was supposed to look like in America.
COICA was written for Hollywood’s benefit
COICA is just the beginning. It’s the first step in transforming the internet into an environment completely controlled by the government. If the Senate can move along a law that creates a copyright blacklist, the next step is to create a blacklist for political extremism. Once we’ve established the principle that you can just pull a switch and blacklist sites that the government doesn’t like, where does it end?
Liberals screeched for years about the Patriot Act, but very little attention is being paid to COICA, which is primarily co-sponsored by Democratic senators. The endless Hollywood movies bemoaning the oppression of the Patriot Act, won’t give way to movies bemoaning COICA. But that’s because COICA was written for Hollywood’s benefit. And the forms of oppression that are practiced by the people who make movies about oppression, naturally don’t make it into movies.
Some conservatives are defending COICA as a means of protecting private property, but it’s not. It creates a privileged status for specific industries through government action, which those specific industries paid for. This is classic ‘Rent Seeking Behavior’ which uses government force to protect a bad business model. Hollywood is suffering from the plague of piracy because of its own convoluted structure and its need to negotiate every iota of every action with its own unions. Rather than adapt and evolve, it uses lawyers and lobbyists to protect its defective business practices. And having a ‘red phone’ to the AG’s office in order to protect defective business practices does the entertainment industry no favors in the long term.
COICA is a unconstitutional bailout of our freedoms and internet civil rights for a specific industry that has troubling implications for everyone. And it’s a demonstration of just how dangerous the intersection of corporate lobbyists and politicians can be. Some conservatives believe that supporting capitalism means blindly endorsing any corporate action. It does not. When corporations subvert public representation and harness government force for their own benefit, then they act like a part of the government.
Leahy is a perfect example, a Senator from Vermont, not exactly a major hub of the entertainment industry, with deep ties on the other coast. Leahy’s ties to big Hollywood studios like Time Warner go so ridiculously deep that he actually got a part in the last Batman movie and had the movie premiere at his own fundraising event back in Vermont. Carrying water for Hollywood has nothing to do with the needs of Vermont’s citizens. But this is what happens when corporations can buy themselves their own senators.
Leahy picked up that infamous 335,906 from TV and movie industry donors and PAC’s. He was the third largest recipient of entertainment industry money in the Senate. The top recipient, Senator Schumer is a COICA cosponsor. So is the 5th top recipient, Senator Gillibrand, Schumer’s own trojan horse. And there’s plenty of overlap between top donors and cosponsors on the rest of this list. This isn’t unusual. This is how Washington D.C. does business all the time. And that’s the scary part.
This isn’t just about the entertainment industry. It’s about how the intersection of money and power, routed through a centralized federal government can and does lead to tyranny. When politicians are given a legislative framework that allows them to exercise virtually unlimited powers, without regard to the United States Constitution or individual freedoms or the public will, and then allowed to put that power at the service of their biggest donors, the end result is not democracy, but oligarchy. And COICA is another product of that oligarchy.
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About Sen. Patrick Leahy:
- U.S. Senator representing Vermont
- Opposed U.S. military support for the Contras in their fight against the Marxist Sandinistas
- Opposed the 1991 Persian Gulf War
- Voted against funding the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq
- Called the Guantanamo Bay detention center “an international embarrassment to our nation”
[…]
After serving for eight years as State Attorney in Chittenden County, he was elected to the U.S. Senate (representing Vermont) as part of the Democrat class of 1974 that was swept into office as a result of the Watergate scandal that brought down the Nixon presidency. Leahy has been re-elected every six years since then.
While serving as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the mid-1980s, Leahy earned the nickname “Leahy the Leaker” because of his propensity to publicly reveal sensitive intelligence data. In a 1985 television appearance, for instance, he disclosed classified information that had enabled the Egyptian government to capture the Arab terrorists who had hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship and killed an American citizen. Leahy’s indiscretion may have cost the life of at least one of the Egyptian operatives involved in that capture.
In 1986 Leahy leaked secret information about a covert plan by the Reagan administration to overthrow Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi. A few weeks later, details of the plan appeared in The Washington Post, and the operation was cancelled.
In January 1987 Leahy was forced to resign as vice chair of the Intelligence Committee after leaking classified information about the Iran-Contra affair. It was considered to be one of the most serious breaches of secrecy in the Committee’s history.
In the 1980s Leahy traveled to Nicaragua and openly opposed U.S. military support for the Contras in their fight against the Marxist, Soviet-sponsored Sandinistas. In 1990 Leahy joined with Senator Robert Byrd in spearheading the fight to cut $500 million out of an emergency aid package that President George H.W. Bush had requested for anti-communist initiatives in Panama and Nicaragua. In addition, Leahy and Senator Chris Dodd co-sponsored legislation to cut U.S. aid to the government of El Salvador, which was at war against Marxist-Leninist militias backed by Cuba and the Soviet Union.
Leahy has long opposed the development of a missile-defense system; when the Senate passed a bill (by a 97-3 margin) to develop such a system in 1999, Leahy cast one of the three ballots against the measure.
According to a 2001 National Review story, Leahy was considered, by a consensus of Capitol Hill Republicans, the “meanest, most partisan, most ruthless Democrat in the Senate.”
Leahy has voted against the confirmation of many Republican nominees for key government posts, including such notables as Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales. He also voted against Republican Supreme Court nominees William Rehnquist, Robert Bork, and Clarence Thomas. On numerous occasions he used filibusters to obstruct the confirmation of George W. Bush nominees, whereas during theClinton presidency, Leahy had vigorously opposed filibusters.
When President Bush nominated Samuel Alito to replace the outgoing Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court in October 2005, Leahy lamented that with Alito’s confirmation, “the Court will lose some of [its] diversity.” The senator also complained that Bush had bypassed many “highly qualified women, African Americans, Hispanics and other individuals” who “could well have served as unifying nominees” while making the Court’s membership “more reflective of the country it serves.” Many American women, Leahy speculated, were undoubtedly “somewhat saddened that the seat of the first woman [O’Connor] to serve on our highest court is not going to be filled by another woman.”
Leahy opposed the 1991 Persian Gulf War and voted against funding the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (all of which were led by Republican presidents). By contrast, he supported President Clinton‘s military ventures in the Balkans, and in December 1998 he justified Clinton’s four-day bombing campaign against suspected Iraqi WMD sites, saying: “There is no doubt that since 1991, Saddam Hussein has squandered his country’s resources to maintain his capacity to produce and stockpile chemical and biological weapons.” Yet in March 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq by President George W. Bush, Leahy declared: “I cannot pretend to understand the thinking of those in the administration who for months or even longer seemed possessed with a kind of messianic zeal in favor of war.”
Leahy was an avid supporter of the late Marla Ruzicka, an anti-war activist who worked closely with Medea Benjamin, Global Exchange, and Code Pink for Peace.
In 1999 Leahy traveled to Cuba, where he dined with Fidel Castro.
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