The slings and arrows of outrageous legislation, proposed and enacted, fly at you in fusillades from every direction. The enemy lurches towards you, massive, determined, unstoppable. The cavalry you expected to throw him back in confusion has decided to sit this one out. Betrayed, you’re on your own.

In this case, it is the National Rifle Association that has literally decided to sit this one out. After swearing that the freedom and right to bear arms is also dependent on the freedom of speech, it has decided to recuse itself from the First Amendment objections in exchange for a protected status. It will not oppose H.R. 1575, the Disclose Act, sponsored by Maryland Democrat Christopher Van Hollen. The purpose of this legislation is to counter the Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case, which freed corporations and non-profits from many of the restrictive speech provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. It was a qualified victory for the First Amendment.

The NRA’s first obligation must be to its members and to its most ardent defense of firearms freedom for America’s lawful gun owners….The NRA will continue to fight for its right to speak out in defense of the Second Amendment. Any efforts to silence the political speech of NRA members will, as has been the case in the past, be met with strong opposition.

The rest of you can pound sand. (more…)

Thursday, in his resounding defense of the First Amendment in the Citizens United decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority:

…[w]hen Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.

“Censorship” is a dirty word in America, and that is why the restrictions at issue in our case were cloaked in the guise of “campaign finance reform.”  But the fact remains that any restrictions on political speech, especially those that criminalize such speech, send us down a very slippery and very dangerous slope.

Last March, our government argued in court that it has the Constitutional authority to ban books that mention a candidate for federal office.  The government later retracted that statement, but is there any doubt that such a statement never would have been made if there had not been 100 years of progressively more intrusive restrictions on political speech preceding it?    Had the Court not acted, what was to prevent the government from asserting that authority over the internet, which does not have the benefit of two centuries of tradition and jurisprudence protecting it?

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For long-suffering conservatives, Christmas arrived about a month late this year.  But considering all the presents we got this week, it was like coming downstairs and finding the Budweiser Clydesdales under the tree, instead of that crummy used Radio Flyer your dad managed to find on eBay for twenty bucks.

First, on Tuesday, there was the Massachusetts Miracle, in which an obscure state senator named Scott Brown came out of nowhere — okay, Wrentham — to defeat a lackluster and morally dubious Democrat machine party hack who had expected to slow-walk herself, with David Gergen’s blessing, into “Teddy Kennedy’s seat.”  But the Bay State voters had other ideas for the “Massachusette” –

Brown ran hard on the selling point that he would be the 41st vote in the Senate against Harry Reid’s and Nancy Pelosi’s screwball tax-and-wreck “health care” plan, a Rube Goldbergian contraption that would have made Elbridge Gerry weep with envy at all its cut-outs, set-asides, bribes and special-interest stroking.  He also campaigned on the notion that taxpayer dollars would be better spent fighting terrorists instead of paying for lawyers for them.  So, naturally, the first questions he got yesterday from the press corps in Washington were all along the lines of: “You’re not really a Republican, are you?”

To which the Democrats, caught flat-footed as usual, basically reacted like this: (more…)

When John McCain co-authored the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law he probably didn’t envision it helping him lose his run for the presidency in 2008, but such is the law of unintended consequences.  McCain-Feingold restricted large donors from taking out ads in support of candidate and issues. This mainly penalized corporate donors. When Obama reneged on his commitment to participate in federal financing for his general election campaign, McCain was left holding the bag. He was restricted as to how much money he could spend. If his law hadn’t existed, he would have been able to get around that problem and match Obama’s media saturation.

The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law was unconstitutional on its face, and no true conservative could believe it when President Bush signed it into “law.”  Even though our representatives swear an oath to defend the constitution, they continually pass laws that subvert it. One of the only remedies to this is the courts, and finally today the SCOTUS essentially nullified the law in a 5 to 4 decision. (more…)

Fans of the First Amendment can rejoice.  In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court today struck down large portions of the abomination known as the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, especially those aspects of the law that imposed restrictions on corporate spending on political issues.

From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

The ruling was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace will corrupt democracy.

“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included the four members of its conservative wing, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”

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