Wales Readies Measure To Outlaw Lying on the Hustings

Talk about legislating morality. Lying on the campaign trail would be outlawed under a measure being weighed by the parliament of Wales. Would such a reform run the risk of leaving politicians tongue-tied? The Welsh backers of the bill point with alarm to America, our Luke Funk reports, and seek “safeguards” to prevent “a Trump-like figure from rising to power in Wales on the back of persistent falsehoods and exaggerations.”A Welsh proponent of criminalizing campaign canards, Jennifer Nadel, avers that “when lies travel faster than the truth, democracy becomes dangerously easy to game.” Yet self-government has flourished for centuries in Wales and Great Britain — not to mention America — absent any attempt by the government to prosecute political prevarications. What’s the urgency, then, in the Welsh proposal save for a desire to blame Mr. Trump? The London School of Economics’ Jeremy Horder tells the BBC that an “over-broad false statement law” of the stripe envisioned by the Welsh could “have an unduly chilling effect on the speech of conscientious people and media outlets.” A Welsh legislator, Lee Waters, fears that the proposed bill “could inadvertently restrict legitimate debate and political discussion.” On that head, one can imagine how such a law might have influenced American elections.Would, say, JFK have faced a penalty of the kind anticipated by the Welsh solons over his claims during the 1960 election that America faced a “missile gap” that imperiled the nation in its conflict with Soviet Russia? Shortly after Kennedy took office, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara conceded the gap was, in contemporary parlance, fake news. The Kennedy campaign likely knew this, PBS reported, “but went ahead with its claims anyway.”Kennedy’s “claims were exaggerated,” a Columbia political scientist, Robert Shapiro, reckoned, “but at the time it wasn’t something that could be fact checked.” Some three decades later, would a Welsh-style fib ban have landed President George H.W. Bush in the jug for pledging, at the 1988 GOP convention, “Read my lips: No new taxes”? Yet in 1992 it was the voters who punished Bush for that broken promise by denying him a second term.Similarly, President Ford’s denial, during a debate in 1976 against Jimmy Carter, that there was any “Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” helped foment Ford’s loss at the polls. Meanwhile, President Clinton skated despite his statement that “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” even though Republicans sought to impeach him for, among other things, his misstatements. The voters appeared to overlook the falsehood. The indulgence of voters for Mr. Clinton could be seen as finding an echo in the case of President Trump. Few would deny his tendency to wield exaggeration as a rhetorical device and a negotiating tactic. Yet just as voters were willing to give Mr. Clinton a pass for his foibles, a sizable swath of the electorate seems to take with a grain of salt Mr. Trump’s braggadocio. Exaggeration, after all, can be used to put the truth in sharp relief.A ban on campaign lies could well have tripped up Senator Bernie Sanders, who on the hustings in 2015 asserted that America has more “income inequality than any major country on earth.” The fact-checkers pounced. Meanwhile, could Mayor Zohran Mamdani face Welsh-style scrutiny after running on a vow to tax the rich? He is now pushing a scheme that would raise taxes on all New York City property owners, the poor among them, by nearly 10 percent.Ms. Nadel reckons the Welsh legislation is “about drawing a clear line: deliberately deceiving the public in order to gain or retain power is not politics as usual, it is an abuse of trust.” Yet if self-government in Britain and America has taught anything, it is that questions of political judgment are best handled not by legislators or judges, or other regulators, but by the voters. Os ydych chi’n credu y gallech chi brynu’r bont hon yn Brooklyn.

Wales Readies Measure To Outlaw Lying on the Hustings

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