Fox “News”: Amend Constitution So Democrats Can’t Lie During Election

Oh, the Hypocrisy - It Burns

by Marc Belisle

As we all know, the august broadcasting institution known as Fox “News” is a bastion of “Fair and Balanced” reporting. They would never dream of cherry-picking out-of-context, twisted or simply invented “facts.” They would never aggressively peddle opinion as fact with slick packaging and arrogant bloviation to pursue a partisan agenda at the height of an election. Oh, no.
As enormous election year 2016 begins to take off, Fox wants to force everyone else to be just as honest as they are. So, it was a great public service that Fox “News” published a recent op-ed entitled, “Harry Reid is the poster child for why our Constitution must be changed.” Said op-ed argued that we need to remove the text from Article I of the Constitution which provides immunity from defamation lawsuits to members of Congress. At first blush, it might sound like a decent idea to force our elected officials to give it to us straight. Our politicians do lie a lot. But if you think our government is dysfunctional now, imagine how fun it will be when anyone in the world can sue anyone in Congress for lying. The article, by Fox shrieking head Gregg Jarret, is featured prominently on Fox’s opinions page as an “editor’s pick.”
The reason for Jarrett’s gripe is that, in 2012, when Mitt Romney was just about to glide into the White House, according to Jarrett, Harry Reid was mean to him, and then he lost. Sad face.

At the height of the heated campaign for President in August of 2012, then Majority Leader Harry Reid stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate and smeared Mitt Romney as a millionaire tax dodger. Reid claimed the Republican nominee paid no taxes for ten years.
It was an audacious and deceitful claim because Reid possessed no evidence. He presented not a scrap of proof…because none existed. He appeared to invent the accusation out of thin air in a brazen ploy to turn votes away from Romney in favor of Obama.

Harry Reid used a “brazen ploy” to help his own party win an election! How dare he? Jarrett continues that the Founding Fathers could not have imagined that someone in Congress would abuse the legal immunity given to protect debate in order to slander a private citizen running for the White House mere weeks from the election “and subvert the democratic process.” The problem is compounded, Jarrett writes, because Harry Reid is still not sorry about it.
It’s nice to hear a Fox shrieking head concerned about the “democratic process.” That’s refreshing. If we go along with Jarrett’s assertion that Reid went too far, Reid’s comment is pretty mild compared to the slander that the right has slung in Presidential elections in recent history. From Willie Horton to Swiftboating and the birth certificate, conservative politicians and media like Fox spin complex yarns of terrifying fiction every election cycle, in an attempt to see it stick to Democrats. It’s kind of a well-established tradition. The most recent example of this was in 2014, at the height of the midterms, when wingnuts peddled the idea that a devastating Ebola pandemic was imminent, despite experts explaining it was pretty much impossible to contract in a country with decent public health infrastructure. But based on the assumption that we were one sneeze away from The Stand, they argued that Obama was allowing America to be infected for his nefarious purposes. Funny enough, Gregg Jarrett was an eager participant in incubating this idea and infecting his readers with it. Is he sorry about that?
The Ebola story was quite a whopper. Wondering how Romney got rich? Meh. It’s worth remembering that in 2012, the whole country, including many nervous Republicans, were asking, “WHY?!” Romney was the only major Presidential nominee in modern history to refuse to show the nation his tax returns. It is a fact that he was hiding something. We may never know what he was hiding, but whatever it was, he calculated that it was worse than the weeks of speculation about the mystery that dogged him. He sold himself to the American people as the right man for the Presidency because he was a successful businessman, but then told the voters they didn’t need to know how he made all his money. That proved to be an untenable contradiction. Harry Reid did not sink Mitt Romney, Mitt Romney sank Mitt Romney, and President Obama’s high popularity after four years, relative to Presidents in recent history, bought him a second term.
Jarrett compares Reid’s comments about Mitt Romney to Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts. In the world of political attacks, this is a bit like comparing the bite marks of a mosquito to those of a Tyrannosaurus. Romney wanted to be President Ritchie Rich without answering any questions, and Reid grabbed him by his Achilles heel. McCarthy destroyed the careers and reputations of thousands of innocent people. His hearings have more in common with the actual Salem witch trials than an opportunistic political attack on a powerful figure trying to pull a fast one. McCarthy’s judgment may have been compromised by the fact that he was a major alcoholic. This is something that Gregg Jarrett ought to keep in mind as he returns to reporting for Fox “News,” after his arrest for being belligerently drunk in an airport last year.
Changing the Constitution is a complex, serious matter, and should not be taken lightly. Jarrett’s desire to amend something as fundamental to our republic as Article I, section 6’s “Speech or Debate Clause,” highlights the fact that today’s conservatives aren’t conserving anything, but are often radical in their quest to subvert the will of the people and the legitimate authority of the government to corporate privatization and imperialism. If we’re going to consider changing the Constitution, there are a number of potential amendments that would be well worth the effort, including the Equal Rights Amendment, and an Amendment to overturn Citizens United.