National Review Online
Tuesday, September 09, 2014
Senate Democrats are on the precipice of voting to repeal
the First Amendment.
That extraordinary fact is a result of the increasingly
authoritarian efforts of Democrats, notably Senate majority leader Harry Reid
of Nevada, to suppress criticism of themselves and the government, and to
suffocate any political discourse that they cannot control.
The Supreme Court in recent years has twice struck down
Democratic efforts to legally suppress inconvenient speech, citing the
free-speech protections of the First Amendment in both cases. Senator Reid’s
solution is to nullify the first item on the Bill of Rights.
The Democrats are not calling this a repeal of the First
Amendment, though that is precisely what it is. Instead, they are describing
the proposed constitutional amendment as a campaign-finance measure. But it
would invest Congress with blanket authority to censor newspapers and
television reports, ban books and films, and imprison people for expressing
their opinions. So long as two criteria are met — the spending of money and
intending to influence an election — the First Amendment would no longer apply.
The Democrats, keenly appreciating the boobishness of
their voters, present this as a measure to regulate “corporations,” but the
amendment explicitly empowers Congress to regulate individuals as well. As for
those corporations: The New York Times is a corporation; ABC News is part of a
corporation; NPR is a corporation; Random House is a corporation; Gawker is a
corporation; National Review is a corporation. Neither the First Amendment nor
any substantive body of American jurisprudence distinguishes media corporations
from other sorts of corporations, nor should it. Freedom of speech and freedom
of the press are not restricted to journalists and newspaper publishers. The
same First Amendment that protects Scott Pelley protects Noam Chomsky and you,
in exactly the same way.
It is worth reiterating that for all of the apocalyptic
talk about all-powerful corporations, the Citizens United decision was at its
heart about the fact that the government sought to make it a crime to show a
film critical of Hillary Clinton at a time when she was running for office. The
First Amendment plainly does not allow this, and the Supreme Court said as
much. A First Amendment that does not protect criticizing political figures is
not a First Amendment at all.
The amendment that Democrats are putting forward is an
attack on basic human rights, the Constitution, and democracy itself. If those
who would criticize the government must first secure the government’s
permission to do so, they are not free people.
Harry Reid and Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico, the
amendment’s author, should be ashamed of themselves. The First Amendment has
been a bulwark of liberty for more than two centuries, since long before either
of the states that these vandals represent was even in the Union. Given a
choice between free speech — in all its messy, uncomfortable, and unpredictable
glory — and Harry Reid as national censor, we will take free speech.
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