Your First Amendment rights include the freedom of speech, but that’s breaking news to four of the nine justices of the Supreme Court. Cato Institute’s Ilya Shapiro, a Senior Fellow in Constitutional studies and Editor-in-Chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review writes:
What at kind of bizarro world do we live in where a near majority of Justices of the United States Supreme Court criticizes a First Amendment ruling for being overly concerned with “the individual’s right to engage in political speech”? Where these same jurists instead elevate “the public’s interest in preserving a democratic order in which collective speech matters”? Are these four reactionary horsemen who won’t countenance anti-war protestors, marches against oppressive laws, and other anti-establishment speech-acts? Or perhaps they’re censorious troglodytes inveighing against flag-burning, nude dancing, and other emotion-riling forms of expression?
It turns out no, that this statist-majoritarian cant is the highest explication of so-called “liberal” dissent. We’ve always been at war with Eurasia (at least until those in charge decree that our eternal enemy is Eastasia), etc.
Rubbish. Just as the government can’t limit the number of hours that Oprah broadcasts or issues that The New York Times publishes — lest they “unduly” influence our political system — it can’t restrict the money that someone wants to spend on campaign donations lest he “skew” the marketplace of ideas. Heck, I’ve been part of enough SCOTUSblog symposia that I’m sure glad there’s no federal limit on how much analysis someone can provide on a website that’s read by all the key opinion-making eyeballs!
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