Thread: The Left's Attempt to Repeal the First Amendment

The Left's Attempt to Repeal the First Amendment

September 8, 201

UPDATE: This week, the Senate is expected to consider S.J. Res. 19, a proposed constitutional amendment which would give Congress and state governments vast new authority to regulate speech. The measure is expected to fail, but it nevertheless emphasizes the desire of many liberals to restrict political dissent. Please see this excellent op-ed by former Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson explaining the dangers of the proposed amendment.

This attempt to gut the First Amendment also highlights the dangers of an Article V convention. Although S.J. Res. 19 depends upon congressional approval, progressive groups pursuing the same goal embrace a convention as a way of achieving it. In some states, legislation has been introduced calling for a constitutional convention to consider amendments that would roll back protections for free speech.

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June 2, 2014

Dissatisfied with ignoring the Constitution through judicial supremacy and executive overreach, liberals in Congress now want to repeal its essential provisions, starting with the First Amendment. Tuesday, June 3, the Senate Judiciary Committee is holding hearings aboutS.J.Res.19, "Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relating to contributions and expenditures intended to affect elections." Leftist senators are suggesting this amendment in response to recent Supreme Court decisions that have found campaign finance restrictions unconstitutional. Senator Ted Cruz describes the meaning of this proposed amendment, which has 41 cosponsors: Proponents of the amendment also say it would just "repeal Citizens United" or "regulate big money in politics." That is nonsense. Nothing in the amendment is limited to corporations, or to nefarious billionaires. It gives Congress power to regulate-and ban-speech by everybody.
Indeed, the text of the amendment obliquely acknowledges that Americans' free-speech rights would be eliminated: It says "[n]othing in this article shall be construed to grant Congress the power to abridge the freedom of the press." Thus, the New York Times is protected from congressional power; individual citizens, exercising political speech, are not.
Fortunately, the bill has little chance of gathering the required two-thirds majority support in the Senate, let alone enough support from the House of Representatives or the states. Nevertheless, S.J.Res.19 is a dangerous effort by liberals, and highlights the lengths they will go to in order to silence political opponents. Eagle Forum will continue to track this amendment in Congress and keep you updated.

From Eagle Forum

Awake yet America?????

Human Events

Senate Republicans, with a twinkle in their eye, voted to advance the Democrats’ stupid bill.
Now Democrats look utterly foolish as they whin to the media about how those mean old Republicans took their base-goosing clown act seriously....

Good times.




Democrats flummoxed by Republicans taking their anti-free-speech bill seriously | Human Events
"Stop us before we waste more of America's time!" is not a winning 2014...
humanevents.com

Democrats flummoxed by Republicans taking their anti-free-speech bill seriously



By: John Hayward
9/9/2014 08:49 AM
Video at the page link:

We truly do live in strange times, when the Republicans – who are supposed to be far less skilled at parliamentary maneuvers – can make the Democrats look like a pack of utter fools with a single deft move in the Senate. Senate Democrats have been wasting America’s time on a showboating effort to repeal the First Amendment – a bill they know is doomed to go nowhere, but it would give them something to sell to their dispirited base going into the midterm elections. The Republicans were supposed to slap this dumbassery down, giving Democrats a chance to run to their gullible base voters and cry: See, we tried to do something about the evil Koch Brothers, but those rascally Republicans stopped us, because they think billionaires should be able to buy elections!
It’s yet another scene from the long liberal passion play after the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, as the party so often eager to shriek about “the settled law of the land” in other contexts fights a never-ending theatrical struggle to rewrite the First Amendment so that only left-leaning groups will be able to influence the political process. Labor unions and media corporations should have exclusive access to the American mind during election season, don’t you know. It’s probably in a penumbra of the Constitution somewhere.


But Senate Republicans, with a twinkle in their eye, voted to advance the Democrats’ stupid bill, making the Democrats look utterly foolish as they whined to the media about how those mean old Republicans took their base-goosing clown act seriously. See if you can spot the magic word in this article from Politico about the debacle:

Several Senate Republicans joined Democrats on Monday to advance a constitutional amendment that would give Congress and the states greater power to regulate campaign finance.
But the bipartisanship ends there.
Many of the Republicans only voted for the bill to foul up Democrats’ pre-election messaging schedule, freezing precious Senate floor time for a measure that ultimately has no chance of securing the two-thirds support necessary in both the House and Senate to amend the Constitution.
The legislation needed 60 votes to advance and Democrats took a cynical view of the 79-18 tally. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said the GOP’s tactic was simply to “stall” because it would eat up limited floor time that Democrats are eyeing for votes aimed at encouraging gender pay equity and raising the minimum wage.
“They know we’re getting out of here fairly shortly and they want to prevent discussion on other very important issues,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). “I would love to be proven wrong. But if the end of this week, we end up getting 67 votes, you can tell me I was too cynical.”

Fine effort if you thought the magic word was “bipartisanship” – as if the Democrats’ bill wasn’t the most blatantly partisan effort imaginable! – but the word I was looking for is “cynical.” If you said “cynical,” imagine a duck coming down from the ceiling on strings and giving you $50, just like on Groucho’s game show. There have been few political efforts in history as cynical as what Democrats are trying to do here: gobbling up Senate time on a futile grandstanding performance that was supposed to fail, in an appeal targeted narrowly at totalitarian leftists who have little patience for “free speech” when it emanates from people they don’t like, and which is not-so-subtly micro-targeted at two specific Americans, Charles and David Koch. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid actually kicked off the festivities yesterday with yet another foaming tirade against the Koch Brothers from the Senate floor – the only place he can get away with peddling his slander without getting sued.
Of all the issues demanding America’s attention, the campaign spending of the sixty-eighth largest donors ranks very, very low on the list. Most people are not terribly interested in the Democrat Party’s thoughts on which billionaires should have unlimited access to the American mind, and which should be muzzled and shoved out of the public square. I notice Harry Reid has little to say about the number one donor, Democrat sugar daddy Tom Steyer. Number Two is gun-control fanatic Michael Bloomberg. None of the top 10 donors are Republicans. Most of the top corporate donors are labor unions. As for those eeeeeeevil money-gushing Super PACs, the top-spending organization, by far, is… why, by Jove, it’s Harry Reid’s Senate Majority PAC!
The American system has a great many serious problems, and some of them will prove fatal soon enough. Partisan caterwauling about the opposition party’s campaign donors does not address any of the actual problems with our government. Get that through your rock-solid skulls, Democrats: the problem is government, not the people and their stubborn insistence on saying things you don’t like.
Watching the Democrats blubber and whine to their media pals about how the Republicans cynical messed up their cynical little game by voting in favor of advancing the bill is hilarious. Unfortunately for the Democrats, it’s also the only part of this little circus act that’s likely to resonate with anyone beyond political junkies and hardcore base voters. “Wait a minute… they’re upset because the Republicans voted in favor of their bill?” is a sports-bar laugh line. Complaining that Republicans are supposed to be the grown-ups who rein in childish Democrat temper tantrums is not a winning public-relations strategy. It’s almost as if the Democrats are pleading with the American people to relieve them of all responsibility: please, stop us before we waste more of your time and money.
As Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the man waiting to take the Majority Leader’s gavel away from Harry Reid and use it for something better than cudgeling the Koch Brothers, put it in an op-ed for Politico over the weekend:

If all this seems like an object lesson in why most Americans are so disgusted with Washington right now, that’s because it is. With legislative priorities like this, it’s no wonder a recent Quinnipiac poll found that just 14 percent of respondents say they think the government in Washington can be counted on to do what’s right most or all of the time.
A more sensible approach would be for the Democrats who run the Senate to take up the slew of job-creation bills the Republican-controlled House already has passed, some with overwhelming bipartisan support. But Senate Democrats prefer to spend their time on bizarre sideshows like trying to take an eraser to the First Amendment.
None of this should be surprising to even the most casual observer of the Senate these days. Earlier this year, the Democratic leadership rolled out a partisan playbook drafted by campaign staffers that spelled out just how they planned to run the Senate in the run-up to November. It was filled with partisan proposals designed specifically to fail so Democrats could campaign on the failure of that legislation, blaming Republicans for what wasn’t done.

And the only reason they got away with it is because we have a corrupt partisan media that showed little interest in telling the American people what Senate Democrats were up to. You may rest assured the media will grant no such cloak of secrecy to McConnell, which is another good reason to put the Senate in Republican hands this fall. The media will actually pay attention to what they’re doing. If McConnell tries to turn the floor into a slander-proof stage from which he can rail endlessly against Tom Steyer and George Soros, it would be immediately portrayed as a national crisis.
So no, Democrats, you won’t be rewriting the First Amendment to let the ruling party decide what criticisms it will allow the people to hear. You’ll have to put up with political activity from corporations that aren’t run by union bosses. Not only is that contrary to American principles, but we’d be fools to give partisan media operatives even more power to control political discourse in the run-up to elections. Harry Reid provides an excellent object lesson in the dangers of allowing the Fourth Estate to become the fourth branch of government.

http://humanevents.com/2014/09/09/de...paign=heupdate

Harry Reid’s Attack On The Constitution Backfires

September 11, 2014 by Chip Wood

FILE

No sooner had nastily partisan Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared the Senate back in session after its five-week summer recess than he launched a one-two punch that he was sure would score points for Democrats in the upcoming elections. Reid is desperate to preserve the Democratic majority in the Senate — and his plush and powerful position as majority leader.
First, he took to the Senate floor to launch another one of his frothing-at-the-mouth diatribes against those notorious Koch brothers, whom he claims are using their vast wealth to purchase elections for the far right. He never mentions, of course, that conservative Republicans are routinely outspent by wealthy liberal Democrats. He knows that the mainstream media is delighted to help hide the truth and play along with this charade.
But Reid’s angry and dishonest rhetoric was just Part 1 of his cynical campaign. Part 2 was for the Democrats to introduce a new constitutional amendment that would allegedly “correct” the problem, by overriding the freedom-of-speech guarantees in the 1st Amendment.
Just how bad is this Democratic proposal? National Review described it as “an attack on basic human rights, the Constitution, and democracy itself.” It said the measure “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 1st Amendment would no longer apply.”
Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was equally alarmed. He described the bill as “bar none the most radical proposal that has been considered by the United States Senate in the time I have served.”
But the fact is, the bill had absolutely no chance of passage — and Reid knew it. In fact, he was counting on the Republicans’ not even allowing it to be debated on the floor of the Senate. This would give the Democrats some powerful sound bites for campaign attack ads. “See? The Republicans block all of our efforts to prevent those evil billionaires from buying elections.”
But the Republicans derailed Reid’s scheme by actually agreeing to consider the measure. Here’s how Politico described what happened:

Several Senate Republicans joined Democrats on Monday to advance a constitutional amendment that would give Congress and the states greater power to regulate campaign finance.
But the bipartisanship ends there.
Many of the Republicans only voted for the bill to foul up Democrats’ pre-election messaging schedule, freezing precious Senate floor time for a measure that ultimately has no chance of securing the two-thirds support necessary in both the House and the Senate to amend the Constitution.

Thanks to that Republican support, the vote to advance the bill — and, thus, require floor debate — passed by 79-18. Reid was furious that his scheme had collapsed. He said it was all part of a nefarious Republican plot to “stall” other action in Senate.
Sorry, Harry. Now you won’t be able to introduce some of your other go-nowhere grandstand plays this week, such as gender pay equity and raising the minimum wage.
That’s the kind of games the Democrats who control the Senate have been playing this week. It’s no surprise that Reid is terribly worried, as he sees the Democratic majority in the Senate — and his position as majority leader — slipping away.
You can bet that he’ll dream up several other slimy stunts over the next couple of months. Desperate people do desperate things. And Reid is getting desperate.
Until next time, keep some powder dry.
–Chip Wood
Note: The biggest story of the day was, of course, President Obama’s televised address last night. Because of PLD deadlines, I had to turn in this column yesterday morning. I’ll have a lot to say about Obama’s warmongering in subsequent columns.


http://personalliberty.com/harry-rei...ion-backfires/

Actually, senators, you’re the ones who threaten the country


By: David Harsanyi
9/12/2014 06:00 AM

We are, as it always seems, “at a pivotal moment in American history.” At least that’s what Sens. Tom Udall and Bernie Sanders maintained in a melodramatic Politico op-ed last week as they explained their efforts to repeal the First Amendment.

Let me retort in their language:

It’s true that building the United States has been long, arduous and rife with setbacks. But throughout the years, the American people have repelled efforts to weaken or dismantle the First Amendment. We have weathered the Sedition Act of 1918, a law that led to the imprisonment of innocent Americans who opposed the war or the draft. Since then, we have withstood numerous efforts to hamper, chill and undermine basic free expression in the name of “patriotism.” We have, however, allowed elected officials to treat citizens as if they were children by arbitrarily imposing strict limits on their free speech in the name of “fairness.”
But nowadays, after five members of the Supreme Court upheld the First Amendment and treated all political speech equally, liberal activists and Democrats in the Senate would have us return to a time when government dispensed speech to favored institutions — as if it were the government’s to give.
In 2010, the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 opinion striking down major parts of a 2002 campaign-finance reform law in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. This case and subsequent rulings, including McCutcheon v. FEC, have led to more political activism and more grass-roots engagement than ever before. In the 2012 presidential election, we quickly saw the results. More Americans voted than in any election; more minorities voted; more Americans engaged in more debate and had more information in their hands than ever before. More than 60 percent of all those super PAC funds came from just 159 donors, each of whom gave more than $1 million. And still, every vote held the same sway. You may be convinced by someone, but no one can buy your vote. I wish the same could be said for your senators.
Even less worrisome is the propaganda surrounding scary-sounding “dark money” — dollars spent by groups that do not have to disclose their funding sources. The 2012 elections saw almost $300 million spent on engagement in our democratic institutions, and the 2014 midterm elections could see as much as $1 billion invested in political debate. That means more democratization of media and more challenges to a media infrastructure that once managed what news we were allowed to consume. Still, no one can buy your vote.
No single issue is more important to the needs of average Americans than upholding the Constitution over the vagaries of contemporary political life. The people elected to office should be responsive to the needs of their constituents. They should also be prepared to be challenged. But mostly, they should uphold their oath to protect the Constitution rather than find ways to undermine it.
When the Supreme Court finds, for purposes of the First Amendment, that corporations are people, that writing checks from the company’s bank account is constitutionally protected speech and that attempts to impose coercive restrictions on political debate are unconstitutional, we realize that we live in a republic that isn’t always fair but is, for the most part, always free.
Americans’ right to free speech should not be proportionate to their political power. This is why it’s vital to stop senators from imposing capricious limits on Americans.
It is true that 16 states and the District of Columbia, along with more than 500 cities and towns, have passed resolutions calling on Congress to reinstitute restriction on free speech. Polls consistently show that the majority of Americans support the abolishment of super PACs. So it’s important to remember that one of the many reasons the Founding Fathers offered us the Constitution was to offer a bulwark against “democracy.” Senators may have an unhealthy obsession with the democratic process, and Supreme Court justices are on the bench for life for that very reason.
On Monday, Democrats offered an amendment to repeal the First Amendment in an attempt to protect their own political power. Whiny senators — most of them patrons to corporate power and special interests — engaged in one of the most cynical abuses of their power in recent memory. Those who treat Americans as if they were hapless proles unable to withstand the power of a television commercial are the ones who fear speech. That’s not what the American republic is all about.

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist and the author of “The People Have Spoken (and They Are Wrong): The Case Against Democracy.”

http://humanevents.com/2014/09/12/ac...n-the-country/