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To: Brian Griffin

There has to be blowback against this. The Democrats have no moral authority to do this.


3 posted on 11/08/2019 12:50:27 PM PST by Luke21
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To: Luke21
There has to be blowback against this. The Democrats have no moral authority to do this.
. . . and of course there long since would have been . . . but for the fact that “the media” and “the Democrats” are joined at the hip.

It is clear to me, now after all these years, that the 1964 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan Warren Court decision is near to being the crux of the problem. And the good news is that we no longer are ruled by the Warren Court.

In Sullivan, Justice William Brennan wrote for a unanimous majority that that the first amendment required changes in the traditional right to compensation for libel. But Antonin Scalia identified a gaping hole in that seemingly impeccable logic.

In reality, the Bill of Rights was must-pass legislation; the permanence of the ratification of the Constitution was contingent on the Federalists’ coming through with a bill of rights which satisfied the Antifederalists who had nearly prevailed against ratification in some states. Consequently the Bill of Rights, by design, broke no new ground and simply codified the rights which were agreed already existed. Most mundane rights were not enumerated, but are covered in the Ninth (and also the Tenth) Amendments. If such rights were taken to a Federal court, the recourse would not be to the language of the Constitution but to the common law where those rights had always resided.

The Enumerated rights are only those which historically had been denied by tyrants aggrandizing their own power. That is seen obviously in the expression “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” All agreed that the right existed, but the Second Amendment doesn’t fill in the blanks and you have to look at history and precedent to judge such a case.

And, as Scalia noted, the expression “the freedom . . . of the press” does not create or modify freedom of the press, but rather it stipulated that freedom of the press as it already existed could not be changed under the Constitution. The language of the Bill of Rights doesn’t want Antifederalists to think that rights will be improved - it wants Antifederalists to be satisfied that no rights will be changed.

The bottom line is that it is fatuous to claim that “the First Amendment requires a change in traditional rights” - the intent of the Bill of Rights was exactly to the contrary - and the Warren Court erred in saying otherwise in Sullivan
Scalia argued his view on “textualism” was the ultimate defense of the First Amendment. In March 2012, an Associated Press report said he told an audience at Wesleyan University that the Court’s early justices would be “astonished that the notion of the Constitution changes to mean whatever each successive generation would like it to mean. … In fact, it would be not much use to have a First Amendment, for example, if the freedom of speech included only what some future generation wanted it to include. That would guarantee nothing at all.”

That opinion didn’t prevent Scalia from harsh criticism of what is widely viewed as one of the essential court rulings protecting free speech and a free press — the 1964 decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan.

At the Newseum in the Aspen Institute 2011 Washington Ideas Forum, Scalia said the landmark ruling meant “you can libel public figures without liability so long as you are relying on some statement from a reliable source, whether it’s true or not.

“Now the old libel law used to be (that) you’re responsible, you say something false that harms somebody’s reputation, we don’t care if it was told to you by nine bishops, you are liable,” Scalia said. “New York Times v. Sullivan just cast that aside because the Court thought in modern society, it’d be a good idea if the press could say a lot of stuff about public figures without having to worry. And that may be correct, that may be right, but if it was right it should have been adopted by the people. It should have been debated in the New York Legislature and the New York Legislature could have said, ‘Yes, we’re going to change our libel law.’”

But in Times v. Sullivan, Scalia said the Supreme Court, under Justice Earl Warren, “… simply decided, ‘Yes, it used to be that … George Washington could sue somebody that libeled him, but we don’t think that’s a good idea anymore.’”

JUSTICE SCALIA: THE 45 WORDS — AND ORIGINAL MEANING — OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT

Look at the expression, "Scalia said the landmark ruling meant “you can libel public figures without liability so long as you are relying on some statement from a reliable source, whether it’s true or not.” Think: exactly who is “a reliable source?” In 1964 SCOTUS was able to smoke that by people who had (like I) been raised to believe “the news.” That consensus began to erode during the Vietnam War, and I was off the reservation by the middle of the Carter Administration. By now, “the news” as a reliable source is a distant memory. Fake News has killed it.

As a matter of law, the government has no business putting its imprimatur on any “truth” not derived from an adversary process in court. Also as a matter of law, the wire services have violated the Sherman Antitrust Act since 1890 - and since “economizing on expensive telegraphy bandwidth” is an anachronistic mission, no wire service is “too big to fail.” The wire services should be sued into oblivion.

And, Sullivan notwithstanding, all news organizations which have libeled Republicans (no news organization would ever libel a “liberal”) should be sued for very heavy damages.


16 posted on 11/08/2019 2:33:43 PM PST by conservatism_IS_compassion (Socialism is cynicism directed towards society and - correspondingly - naivete towards government.)
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To: Luke21

“There has to be blowback against this. The Democrats have no moral authority to do this.”

Agreed. It’s time to just say NO. This is another Kavanaugh tactic. Just keep piling it on. When this implodes on them, what then? They are running out of options.


17 posted on 11/08/2019 6:29:17 PM PST by ALASKA (Watching an attempted coup by a thousand cuts....)
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