On Fri, 9 Feb 1996, David K. Merriman wrote:

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At 08:27 AM 02/9/96 -0800, Simon Spero <ses@tipper.oit.unc.edu> wrote:

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The Administration has repeatedly stated its belief that those parts of the bill are unconsitutional, and does not intend to enforce them.

So why the fornicate did they include them? What's the point of passing laws that they say they're not going to enforce, unless it's either to enforce them later, or soften up the public for something _slightly_ more tolerable later.

['Fornicate' isn't really a synonym for 'fuck' - only single people can 'fornicate', but married people can still 'fuck' (though apparently there isn't the same motivation)] Basic laws of politics... The reason the telecommunications bill got signed into law in spite of the Exon ammendment is that the bill it was attached to was politically unvetoable. Not only was telecommunications reform an important part of the Clinton/Gore Agenda from 92, but also the amount of lobbying and financial muscle being put behind the bill was such that a veto just because of the CDA would not have been sustained - further, such a veto would be perfect fodder for this Autumn's festival of negative delights. Since it is clear that the courts must reject this part of the bill, it's better to denounce the measure, but sign the bill anyway, knowing that the nasty bits will be cut out (or rather, the nasty bits won't be ... oh, you know what I mean). If the CDA wasn't so blatantly unconstitutional, then I believe that the President would have vetoed it- the anti-abortion elements make it completely unacceptable; however, since the courts really have no choice but to remove the indeceny provisions, Bill gets a pretty nice equivalent of a retroactive line-item veto. Simon p.s. Talking about Negative Ad's: there's a great new book out called "Going Negative" by Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar. This book is an extended write up of some extremely well designed experiments designed to measure the effect of poltical advertisments on the public. For perhaps the first time ever in the Social Sciences, the authors performed actual, real, honest to goodness experiements, and the data are quite convincing. The most worrying results are that 1) Political advertising is isomorphic to the prisoners dilemma, and once an opponent uses a negative ad, the only way to respond is with counter-attacks 2) One of the main effects of negative advertising is not to change peoples votes, but to reduce turnout.