Free Republic

No matter what you think of J.D. Hayworth — former Congressman, talk-show host, anti-illegal immigration hardliner and Abramoff-scarred beneficiary — one thing you’ve got to like about him is that he is mounting a primary challenge to Sen. John McCain (R, Media) in Arizona. That would be the head RINO-in-chief and First Amendment enemy — RIP, McCain/Feingold! — who threw the election to Barack Obama in 2008 by taking everything that was interesting and/or objectionable about the former Barry Soetoro — his past, his associates, even his name — off the table and thus gave himself exactly zero chance to...

Nothing—not even George W. Bush—has sent liberaldom screaming into the streets more than the Supreme Court's recent 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The Court's ruling that corporations have a free-speech right to express opinions about politicians running for office really let the furies out. President Obama's in-their-face criticism of the Supreme Court over Citizens United at his State of the Union speech got pundits on every blogger barstool chattering about the propriety of this public smackdown. That's nothing compared to how the Supremes smack each other inside their public decisions. Justice John Paul Stevens dismissed the...

It's a good bet that the conversation in the Supreme Court break room the morning after the president's State of the Union speech was about Obama's drive-by distortion of its ruling in Citizens United v. FEC. Predictably, the spin at The Washington Post and Chicago Tribune was "Alito Disparages Obama's Supreme Court Criticism." Where else but in the Bizarro World of Obama's branch offices at the Post, Trib, and MS-NBC could we find such a polar opposite version of "reality"? Like their champion, these media corporations are extremely vexed that the Court leveled the playing field for all corporations and...

A major provision of the “Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002″, aka McCain-Feingold, was largely dismissed by the Supreme Court on January 21, 2010. President Obama’s reaction was swift and almost comically over the top. -... We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing less.Uh-oh! Whenever they use the term “bipartisan” you know they’re trying to sucker us. It’s become as transparent as their disingenuous names for bills like the so called “Stimulus” which was supposed to fund “shovel ready jobs” and instead went to non-existent...

In 2000, Senator John McCain asked me to campaign on his behalf for president. I was honored to do so. I remember traveling to South Carolina to act as a one-man truth squad and doing countless television interviews for John. It was a tremendous experience and, as we all know, John came up short. But as always, he fought hard for what he thought was right. But the John McCain I supported for president in 2000 is not the same John McCain I’ve watched frustrate conservatives time and again as our senator. He still fights hard, all right, but too...

MANCHESTER – U.S. Rep. Paul Hodes, D-N.H., said yesterday he intends to introduce a proposed constitutional amendment to overturn a controversial U.S. Supreme Court decision last week that removed corporate and other special interest campaign spending limits. "The upcoming election in New Hampshire should be decided by the people of the Granite State, not special interests with unlimited cash," said Hodes, who is a candidate for the U.S. Senate. "Washington is broken, and this will only make business as usual worse." Hodes said he has been "fighting to stop the power of money in politics and now, after consulting with...

Senate Democrats, taking a cue from President Obama, are ripping into Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito for his understandable (and understated) display of disagreement with the president's misrepresentation of a recent court decision. During last week's State of the Union Address, recall, Obama launched into an unpresidential attack on the court's upending of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance act. Obama incorrectly claimed the ruling -- in which Alito joined the 5-4 majority -- would permit foreign corporate campaign contributions in US elections.

In his State of the Union address, the president of the United States called out the Supreme Court by name for sharp condemnation and egged on his congressional supporters to jeer its recent decision: "Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that's why I'm urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps...

A broken clock...

Sen. Orrin Hatch said Wednesday that President Barack Obama was out of line to use his State of the Union speech to criticize the Supreme Court while six of its members sat nearby. "Taking on the Supreme Court like he did, I thought it was kind of rude," said Hatch, a Utah Republican and former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "It's one thing to say that he differed with the court but another thing to demagogue the issue while the court is sitting there out of respect for his position." Obama called on Congress to "correct" the court's decision...

From the commentary in the mainstream media, I thought there had been a coup d'etat in Washington. The New York Times said what happened "strikes at the heart of democracy." The Washington Post quoted an authority who warned it "threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation." No, not the Scott Brown victory. The media were upset because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that forbidding corporations and labor unions to spend money on political speech before elections is unconstitutional. A horrendous section of the abomination known as McCain-Feingold campaign-finance "reform" had bitten the dust. It was long...

Link only, per FR posting rules

A full year into his presidency we suddenly discover what it takes to get Barack Obama all worked up. Not terrorism. In the president's estimation, a near repeat of the Lockerbie bombing Christmas Day wasn't worth remarking on until three days later. Not the risk of a fiscal doomsday. Only after 12 months of joint one-party rule to secure his place as the biggest-spending president in history does he call for a bipartisan spending-restraint commission and a spending freeze. Both the commission and the freeze don't come along until the fall at the earliest, if they materialize at all. But...

John McCain clings to more liberal positions than almost any other Republican in Congress. Whether encouraging economic suicide by standing against drilling in Alaska, putting the nation's security at risk by equating waterboarding with torture, demanding the shuttering of Guantanamo, joining hands with Ted Kennedy to open the floodgates of amnesty to illegal immigrants, nothing seems to satisfy his vanity more than hearing compliments from the leftist press after crossing over to the other side of the aisle. Now that the Supreme Court has declared much of his crown legislative jewel -- the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (McCain-Feingold) -- to...

It was rather incredible for Barack Obama to express outrage over the Supreme Court's pruning of McCain-Feingold's regulation of public financing and corporate campaign donations, since in June 2008 Obama became the first presidential candidate to forgo public financing in the general election, expecting that by doing so he could raise several millions more, much of it from the Wall Street and big-money interests that he now serially demonizes. The problem with Obama's hypocrisy is not just that, like most politicians, he does not do what he says, but that he fudges so vehemently and loudly and, to be candid,...

THE U.S. SUPREME Court has corrected a mistake it made in 2003, when it upheld a major flaw in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act of 2002. The reform measure, which the Times supported, made several important and positive changes in campaign finance law. It placed a ban on so-called soft money contributions — funds given to political parties and political action committees. Also, the act provided for quick disclosure of the source of all campaign donations and capped direct contribution to candidates. Unfortunately, McCain-Feingold went a step too far in abridging First Amendment free-speech rights by banning corporations and...

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--U.S. President Barack Obama used his weekly radio address on Saturday to assail a Supreme Court ruling this week clearing the way for corporations to spend freely on political advertisements, calling it a big victory for special interests and "devastating to the public interest." He added that his administration is working with Congress to develop a bipartisan legislative solution to override the ruling. "The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections," Obama said in his address.

The White House war on Fox News heated up in early October. It culminated, after almost 3 weeks of harassment, in an unsuccessful effort to exclude Fox, a member of the White House press pool, from an interview with pay czar Kenneth Feinberg. In a successful pushback, members of the press pool unanimously refused to conduct any interview, unless Fox was included. The White House backed down. The language used to marginalize Fox was primarily “Fox is not a legitimate news organization” used by Gibbs on many occasions, and then Communications Director Anita Dunn’s “[T]he way we view it is...

Can the government suppress free speech critical of elected politicians? In the home of the First Amendment, that may seem an unusual question to pose. But that was the question before the Supreme Court this week, as it handed down a landmark ruling in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court struck down a ban on corporations and labor unions using money from their general funds to produce and air campaign ads in races for Congressional and presidential races. Also overturned was a ban on corporations and unions airing campaign ads...

The Supreme Court yesterday confronted a fact in constitutional law that has been hard to justify: How is it that the First Amendment protects obscene speech, nude dancing and talk radio -- but permits Congress to shut down independent political messages from corporations and labor unions? Why do those groups get second-class status when politics, rather than, say, simulated child porn, is the topic? In the Citizens United case, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for a five-justice majority, couldn't be clearer: The federal ban on such independent expenditures is unconstitutional on its face: "Speech restrictions based on the identity of the...