Stoopid Laws

(H/T to Mr. Beck) H.R. 1966, the ‘‘Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act’’

...(amends) the federal criminal code to impose criminal penalties on anyone who transmits in interstate or foreign commerce a communication intended to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to another person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior.

The First Amendment impact, of course, is so egregious that Wired magazine actually cites Eugene Volokh in it's on-line reportage.

After several examples of just how simple, common acts--blogging, editorials, letters to the editor, organizing a Tea Party--can lead to felony charges, if not convictions--Volokh concludes:

...The law, if enacted, would clearly be facially overbroad (and probably unconstitutionally vague), and would thus be struck down on its face under the First Amendment. But beyond that, surely even the law's supporters don't really want to cover all this speech.

What are Rep. Linda Sanchez and the others thinking here? Are they just taking the view that "criminalize it all, let the prosecutors sort it out"? Even if that's so, won't their work amount to nothing, if the law is struck down as facially overbroad -- as I'm pretty certain it would be? Or are they just trying to score political points here with their constituents, with little regard to whether the law will actually do any good? I try to focus my posts mostly on what people do, not on their motives, but here the drafting is so shoddy that I just wonder why this happened.

Personally, I have long suspected that congresscritters often write and/or sponsor idiot legislation, simply to be able to say to their constituents that "See? I tried to do something!"

Note that this is yet another item in the "Can you imagine if they had done this while Bush was President?" file.

When you add up all the constituent parts of the Obama Regime's assault on liberty, even without any anti-gun legislation that has a chance of passing, but including the media's utterly uncritical support for His Imperial Majesty and His co-conspirators in the Duma Parliament Con-gress, the picture gets ugly indeed.