The lede to this Andy Kroll story on the left-wing Mother Jones magazine website is, of course, buried at the bottom — so allow me to resurrect it for you:

The Democrats broke the other way. Chair Ellen Weintraub quoted Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s 2010 comment that “running a democracy takes a certain amount of civic courage”; tea party donors, she said, needed to show that courage. Democrat Ann Ravel, meanwhile, agreed with the Campaign Legal Center’s argument that the Tea Party Leadership Fund’s evidence of harassment paled in comparison to what the NAACP and Socialist Workers Party experienced.

Kroll’s story tells the tale of a tea party group that makes independent expenditures and contributes directly to candidates for federal office that sought an exemption to donor disclosure laws because it had been harassed by the federal government. The same exemption once applied to the NAACP and Socialist Workers Party.

Commissioner Ann Ravel, as you can see above, thinks the Tea Party Leadership Fund simply hasn’t suffered enough harassment to warrant freedom from intimidation, and her colleague Ellen Weintraub invoked verbal comments — not legal precedents or rulings — from a sitting Supreme Court Justice with whom she probably disagrees on everything else he has ever said. Seriously, you can read the SCOTUS opinion on Doe v. Reed (PDF), a ruling that said a gay rights group in Washington state didn’t necessarily have a right to anonymous speech when it participated in a public referendum, a ruling with which Scalia concurred, but wrote his own opinion concurrent with the majority. The Scalia comments Chairwoman Weintraub referenced appear nowhere in his concurrent opinion. That may not matter in the course of how the FEC conducts its business, but if that’s how they do business, why shouldn’t the Republicans on the commission start citing Atlas Shrugged in their arguments? Sports Illustrated?

But even that belies the point: a public referendum on an issue isn’t the same as making independent expenditures or electing candidates to office. It’s also not the case that the plaintiffs in Doe actually suffered any harassment — they simply feared it, according to the majority opinion authored by Chief Justice Roberts. The Tea Party Leadership Fund actually was harassed by the government and, as Kroll tells it, submitted 1,400 pages of evidence.

Related: my June 2012 Daily Caller piece, “First they came for the donor lists…”

“Don’t we all have a right to know,” asks Obama campaign manager Jim Messina in a recent fundraising email, “exactly which corporations and individuals are spending millions in attack ads to influence elections — and what their agendas are?” While we should expect this type of rhetoric from bullies who think that the government should force workers to give up their right to a secret ballot in unionization proceedings, making it easier for Democratic supporters to rake new campaign funds from their peers’ paychecks, this is one of those times when “No” is a complete, forceful, and declarative sentence.

But in fairness to Messina, to whom I wish a swift and humiliating trip to the unemployment line this November, we should (for a moment) take his claim at face value. We should ask, “Upon what moral principle” — we’re talking about rights, after all — “is this ‘right to know’ predicated?”

Perhaps Messina took pages from liberal Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz’s playbook. “[T]his theory of rights is a theory of wrongs,” wrote Dershowitz in Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights. We derive our rights in Dershowitz’s world from “… the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, the Stalinist starvation and purges, the Holocaust, the Cambodian slaughter, and other abuses that reasonable people now recognize to have been wrongs.” Setting aside for a moment what an old professor of mine likes to call the “Heideggerian ‘we’” voice with which Dershowitz writes (the “me and my reader who obviously agrees with me, because no rational person would disagree” voice), Messina could here be attempting to derive the “right to know” from injustices suffered by some individuals at the hands of other individuals and corporations….

The Framers understood quite well that a time would eventually come when the United States government would become so large it would need to encroach on individual liberty to sustain itself, bringing all the force of law and arms to bear upon its endeavors. The Founders had the whole of recorded human history (as we do, and more!) from which to deduce their conclusions. Thus, they drafted institutions with very specific, enumerated powers, and they framed those institutions in our Constitution. They designed this document to shield citizens from abuses of power that would be cloaked in moralistic language. Sadly, those in power, including Senator Incumbent Protection, have many allies in the progressive media who happily gaze into their navels, wondering why society hasn’t been able to destroy liberty more quickly to achieve desired political outcomes.

Do not expect this age-old fight to dissipate in the foreseeable future. But do please join me in calling out those who would lord judgment of our moral character over us if we do not agree with them over our right to participate in the political process without fear of intimidation or retribution from our opponents — a right justly derived from wrongs that litter human history.