The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto spoke with First Amendment God Floyd Abrams a few days ago about the Citizens United decision banning bans on corporate political speech:
“Here is a very committed, very conservative entity that does a film attacking then-Sen. Hillary Clinton when she seemed likely to be nominated for president by the Democratic Party,” Mr. Abrams says. “I ask myself: Well, isn’t it obvious that that sort of speech must be protected by the First Amendment? And then I hear in response to that, ‘Well, they could have used a PAC. Or they could have put the film out farther away from the election. Or they could have refrained from taking any money from any corporate grantor.’
“And my reaction is sort of a John McEnroe: You cannot be serious! We’re talking about the First Amendment here, and we’re being told that an extremely vituperative expression of disdain for a candidate for president is criminal in America?”
Yet, self-proclaimed lovers of the First Amendment everywhere, including the Oval office, have called the majority Justices (Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito) political activists, disrespecters of precedent and tools of corporate interests.
We have to start calling people out on this kind of nonsense.
If the majority is seen as belonging to a particular ideological camp, so too must the minority. Justices Ginsberg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Stevens voted in favor of limiting the reach of the First Amendment (against, I might add, an Amicus Brief filed by the American Civil Liberties Union).
Why do people assume the so-called “liberal’ block of the Court applied flawless legal reasoning in arriving at it’s holding, but the so-called “conservative” block abandoned reasoning simply because they wanted to favor big business? Could it be that these folks are more committed to their private agendas (i.e. limiting corporate political speech to enhance the election chances of candidates they support) then they are the truth?
A gentleman named S.T. Karnick of American Culture blog said it best:
Let’s boil it down in one sentence: A political documentary was banned by the government. That is simply un-American. And, again, four of the nine Supreme Court Justices thought that was OK; that it was not a violation of free speech our Founding Fathers ensconced in the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution — and right at the top.
If there was judicial activism here, it was the minority that engaged in it.
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1 Supreme Court Jurisprudence: Public Opinion is Irrelevant // Feb 18, 2010 at 2:45 pm
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